Embedded Files
Implementation of innovative teaching strategies designed to promote intellectual achievement
Implementation of innovative teaching strategies designed to promote intellectual achievement
I use a variety of innovative teaching strategies to promote intellectual achievement, and I work very hard on a key subset of activities and approaches to do so. I have helped students create audiobooks, write for audiobooks, write for wikipedia, correct "dirty OCR" to help benefit the scholarly project, and more. I restructured my EN102 to engage students more fully in their own learning process by asking students to provide many of the reading materials for our coursework. I seek to innovate at all levels of my classroom, and at all steps connect our writing to "the real world" beyond the classroom.
Essay Shares
One of the most challenging aspects of teaching Composition is that students often feel it is "something they have to do," instead of something they want to do. This affects the classroom dynamic, in addition to a myriad of other problems. To address this, I innovated a component of EN101 where students, after their first Library Instruction session, are responsible for assigning the class readings to their peers. These readings, which must be appropriate examples of popular-scholarly writing on our course theme (substantial essays from The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Wired, Rolling Stone, Psychology Today, and so on), are in turn available to the whole class as potential subjects for their summary assignments. This assignment also has a presentational component and a peer response component, all of which work together to help students learn to identify thesis statements, purpose, audience, research skills, and informational literacy.
Audiobooks
As noted in my Expected teaching section, I routinely incorporate full-class reading or reading aloud in my literature courses, especially my upper-level lit courses, because the language of the material we're reading can be so challenging for students. I have adapted this technique into a more sustained audiobook project. In majors-focused classes, the project is accompanied by a researched critical introduction, and I ask students to (attempt to) get their audiobook published online with LibriVox. In core classes, the requirements are less focused on product and more on process--students are there learning the diction and the syntactical ebb and flow of eighteenth-century prose. I have students in EN340 use Soundcloud to record their readings and write a reflective component that accompanies the audio recording. In the reflective component, students are asked to meditate on the effect of the author's style, what they learned about their own reading habits from the assignment, and/or what it means to exercise one's public voice in this way. I have since incorporated this assignment into a scholarship of teaching publication forthcoming in December, which you can read about in the Scholarship section. You can listen to a sample student project from EN490 that made it all the way to LibriVox, here.
Wikipedia
In addition, I have begun to incorporate Wikipedia as an explicitly purposeful writing and research platform, because it is especially suited to our course content and writing/research goals. Not surprisingly, women writers of the 17th and 18th centuries are minimally represented on Wikipedia, offering a clear and profound contemporary example of the cultural work of canonicity. Why are these authors relatively invisible on the most-often-consulted reference source in the world? What can we do to fix it? What is our responsibility? How does the contemporary digital platform of Wikipedia mimic the public sphere of the early "Enlightenment," and to what end? What sort of writing is best suited for conferring the kind of authority an encyclopedia has? I have incorporated a major full-course Wikipedia project since discovering that Charlotte Lennox's novel, Henrietta, did not have a page, and I have also used a version of this assignment as an option in majors-only courses like EN490. Since then, I have asked students to revise previous student work on the same page, and I have also incorporated writing for Wikipedia as an extra credit option (as in the Global Classroom course). Because students not only have to deal with the difficulties of the literature itself, the Writing Intensive nature of the course, the historical content, as well as the technology, my grading for these assignments is typically guided by the act of completing all the requirements of the project. Style and panache is less of a concern for me at this point; while I emphasize to students that this work is public, I also note that the Wikipedia project is collaborative over time--and we don't have to do it all. My experience with this and similar hands-on projects in a historical content course are the subject of a forthcoming scholarly essay. I continue to work on refining these assignments and their scaffolding; however, it is essential to note that students learn a great deal from these assignments, both about the course content and their roles as student-scholars in a wider world. See also Outstanding Scholarship and Presentations on Teaching, below.
Wikipedia Project Materials (EN340 2015)
Much of our work on the Wikipedia project occurred in workshops and directly online, using the materials above. Students are asked to submit their personal edit history to me via Canvas as evidence of their work. Love in Excess sample was developed as an extra credit option by three students in SP2017.
OCR Correction
In many of my courses, I focus on material history as a way to engage students more actively in the assigned reading and writing. One way I do this is through a project that involves students in the correction of so-called "dirty OCR," which results from poorly-scanned textual data appearing, uncorrected, in scholarly databases like Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) and Early English Books Online (EEBO), as well as many other mass-digitized collections like Project Gutenberg. (If you are interested, you might find this talk by Ryan Cordell a fascinating analysis of the history and future of dirty OCR, as I did!) I have used this assignment most fully in EN490: Major Authors, though I incorporate portions of it in other content-specific classes like EN340. Students first participate in a series of in-class and homework activities, showing students how to use the Mellon-funded TypeWright tool to crowdsource correction, preparing us for larger conversations about how such editorial work fits in with our discussions of canonicity, literary history, and the scholarly project more broadly (i.e., "Why are we reading this stuff, as opposed to other stuff? What is the value of a liberal arts education? Why do details matter?"). At the end of the term, one option among three gives students the opportunity to complete a comprehensive OCR correction, accompanied with a "critical introduction" essay that situates their author's text within its literary history and critical context. Once the OCR correction is completed, students inform the TypeWright administrators at Texas A&M University, where the project is housed, and they in return provide the editor with a copy of the complete XML file and PDF page images to do with as she likes--it can be transformed into a publically available scholarly edition, posted online, and so on. This activity is an example of outstanding innovative teaching because it uses a specific hands-on approach to both connect the past to the present, and dramatize some of the importance of the work we as academics do in a real-world way. I have also presented at national conferences on this subject.
OCR Project Sample
Development of courses and curricula in response to new opportunities within a discipline and/or the changing needs of students
Development of courses and curricula in response to new opportunities within a discipline and/or the changing needs of students
EN208 Digital Approaches to Literature
In response to the new visibility of digital humanities as a methodological approach to literature that may speak more clearly to our quantitatively-focused undergraduates and to meet the needs of our graduate students who plan to teach literature and writing at the community college level, I created and co-created two courses: EN208 Digital Approaches to Literature and EN571 Technology for College Literature and Writing, respectively (EN571 was created with Dr. Bess Fox in 2011, prior to the timespan of this promotion application).
EN208 is meant to help students whose primary skills and expertise are in quantitative fields and computer sciences learn to engage with literature, and to enhance the Media and Performance Studies track within the English department. Over the past ten years, the relatively long-lived fields of humanities computing and computational linguistics converged with new energy under the broad heading, “digital humanities,” defined by Kathleen Fitzpatrick as “the work that gets done at the crossroads of digital media and traditional humanistic study.” Digital preservation and digitization, game theory, topic modelling, digital literary analysis, data visualization, and GIS offer some common approaches in the field. This course, which is designated LT-1 in the Liberal Arts Core and fulfills the INQ requirement, uses the tools of digital media to explore the structure, meaning, and significance of literary works. The course content and methodology is characterized by collaboration and critical making, working together in a lab environment to create and use digital tools that unfold literary meaning. In the process, students will learn and employ the elements of literary analysis, especially genre, theme, imagery, character, and style. The successful curriculum proposal, embedded above, was passed in Spring 2017 and will be offered for the first time in Spring 2018.
Global Classroom
In response to a need from the Center for Global Education, I redeveloped my EN340 Major Women Writers course, which is both LT-2 and WI, as a Global Classroom course, which was offered first in Spring 2017. This course takes my specialized content--women writers before Jane Austen--and examines it specifically within the context of material culture. Yet, our students currently have few curricular opportunities to explore the history and culture of Britain in the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries, a period that functions as the crucible of modern Western culture. Literature of this period--which witnessed the birth of modern habits of consumption--is notably rich in its explorations of the material life of its characters. With the week-long embedded travel component, students have the opportunity to gain very real contextual experience that can bring the literature home in a new way--to see lived-in interiors and assembly rooms, to touch the kinds of clothing worn by people of different classes over time, to hear music and witness how books were printed, and more. With an administrative assistant from our graduate program in English and Humanities, I took students to London, Chawton, and Bath. Throughout our travels, we learned about the material history and lived context of eighteenth-century women writers. Students extended their in-class discussion board posts to a private journaling assignment, and for their final projects, wrote a research-based essay that connected their experience abroad to the material we read in class. Students were able, both on campus and abroad, to experience some true gems of early printing; here, students got hands-on exposure here to 18th century books by or about women in our Gomatos Collection, and in London, we visited the St. Bride Printing Foundation and learned about the history of the trade. We visited Bath, and toured the Assembly Rooms that made such an impression on Jane Austen, and which gave material context to many of the texts we'd read in class that focus on publicity and gender. I am eager to revise this course and teach it again in Spring 2018, when it is next on the schedule. You can view our full itinerary here, and the class syllabus, here.Receipt of peer-reviewed awards or recognition for excellence in teachingIn 2015, I was invited to co-lead a workshop at the Aphra Behn Society focusing on using Wikipedia to teach women's writing. Receiving this invitation was an honor in and of itself, and it speaks in some measure to the esteem with which my peers hold my pedagogical work. I presented at the 2015 ABS with Dr. Laura Runge-Gordon (USF). This innovative work led directly to an invitation to propose a chapter for the Modern Language Association of America's Approaches to Teaching series specifically on digital approaches to Eliza Haywood. I consider these invitations to be peer recognition of excellence in teaching.
Presentation on teaching at a seminar, workshop, or conference at the regional, national, or international level
Presentation on teaching at a seminar, workshop, or conference at the regional, national, or international level
Given the centrality of teaching to our work as Marymount faculty, I believe it is important that I continue to think and rethink my pedagogy. As a result, I often present at conferences on pedagogical subjects. Below are some of my most recent and notable presentations and workshops.
Direction of student research projects or creative works above and beyond expected course load and duties
Direction of student research projects or creative works above and beyond expected course load and duties
Directing student research projects is one of the most exciting parts of my job, and I am always excited to do this work. In the past several years, I have directed five honors student thesis projects and tutorials, and I have also worked with students from Information Technology on a DISCOVER Summer Research Project in which IT students thought about how to communicate across disciplines, learned about the growing profile of digital humanities in academia, and worked with me to further develop Novels in Context, an XML database application I designed during my 2014 sabbatical. Graduate students in our MA program have also worked with me on this project.
Thesis Proposal and Project Direction, Emily Benson, “A Cardboard Baby and a Long-Stemmed Rose: Consumeristic Postfeminism in the Relationships of Women as Represented in Sex and the City,” 2017
Thesis Project Direction, Amanda Bourne, “Imagining the Artist: Images of Virginia Woolf in Postmodern Narratives,” 2016
Thesis Proposal and Project Direction, Man Hsuan Su, “Staging the Stare: (De)constructing the ‘Problem’ of Disability in Tennessee Williams’s Plays,” 2013-2014
Thesis Proposal and Project Direction, Mary Kate Mulligan, “Wham, Bam, Thank You, Ma’am!: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Role in the American Suffrage Movement,” 2012-2013
HON300 Tutorial, Courtney Deal and Jenine Sumrean, “Studies in Performance: Restoration and 18th Century Theater”, Spring 2013
DISCOVER Summer Research Project, Dan Rudd, Greg Arfuso, Nigel Patterson, Novels in Context, Summer 2015.
I have also led graduate independent study courses, most recently with Elizabeth Ricketts, who worked with me on a focused study of three eighteenth-century authors (Alexander Pope, Mary Wortley Montagu, and Jonathan Swift). This work was central to her successful application for PhD study; currently, she is pursuing her degree, fully-funded, at the University of South Florida.
Mentoring students who present their research or creative work at a regional, national, or international conference, or publish in a peer-reviewed journal
Mentoring students who present their research or creative work at a regional, national, or international conference, or publish in a peer-reviewed journal
As noted above, mentoring students as they develop their academic identities is one of the most rewarding parts of being a member of the Marymount faculty. I have been very privileged to work with a number of students who present their research at the following significant national and international professional conferences:
Kaitlyn Giblin, "“To nobody belonging, by nobody was noticed”: Navigating the Bounds of Feminine Authority and Female Authorship in Frances Burney’s Evelina." To be presented at the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference, Howard University, November 2-4, 2017.
Amanda Bourne, “Imagining the Artist: Images of Virginia Woolf in Postmodern Narratives.” Presented at the International Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, Leeds Trinity University, June 16-19, 2016.
Alyce Sustko, “Exploring Religion in Pottermania: Why American Consumers Love the Harry Potter Series.” Presented at the Popular Culture Association of America. Washington, DC, 2013
Mary Kate Mulligan, “Wham, Bam, Thank You, Ma’am!: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Role in the American Suffrage Movement” Presented at the Popular Culture Association professional conference, 2013
Elizabeth Ricketts, “‘Whatever Title Please Thine Ear’: Ambivalence and Mimicry in A Modest Proposal” Presented at Notre Dame University, American Conference for Irish Studies, March 30-April 2, 2016
Channon Fulton, “The School for Scandal: Gossip Then and Popular Media Now” Presented at Longwood University, Virginia Humanities Conference, March 21, 2014
Mary Kate Mulligan, “Women in Patricia Highsmith’s Novels” Presented at the Popular Culture Association of America professional conference, 2012
Adrianne Morris, “The Rolling Wheel of Capitalism.” Presented at the Popular Culture Association of America professional conference, 2012
I also actively encourage my students to present their work in smaller campus and regional conferences:
Emily Benson, “A Cardboard Baby and a Long-Stemmed Rose: Consumeristic Postfeminism in the Relationships of Women as Represented in Sex and the City,” Marymount Student Research Conference 2017.
Amanda Bourne, “Imagining the Artist: Images of Virginia Woolf in Postmodern Narratives.” Presented at the Virginia Humanities Conference, Virginia Military Institute, May 30, 2016.
Richard Henkle, “With This Ring I Thee Wed: Marriage in Mary Pix's The Beau Defeated (1700)." Presented at College of William and Mary, Graduate Research Symposium, March 21-22, 2014
Martinelle Allen, “Another Brick in the Wall: The Rise and Fall of Guy Haines’ Psychological Prison.” Presented at the William and Mary Graduate Research Symposium, Williamsburg VA, 2013.
As a teacher of writing, publication is the ultimate follow-through, and since Fall 2012, the following students have also published work from my courses in Magnificat, Marymount's journal of undergraduate non-fiction, issued both in print and online every April:
“The Invasion of Ads” by Emily Quijano (Composition)
“The Collapse of the Video Rental Industry” by Emily Quijano (Composition)
“Considering the Autobiographical ‘I’: Between Self-Narration and Fiction” by Ashley Tucker (EN424)
“The Gendered Social Norms in Clarissa” by Kadie Aaron (EN426)
“The Power of Voodoo” by Angelica Brewer (EN424)
“Ethical Translation and Intertextuality in Foe and Robinson Crusoe” by Leticia Zelaya (EN424)
“Portrayal of Restoration Women in The Rover“ by Angela White (EN429)
“Deceitful Foils: The Use of Literary Foils to Satirize Deceit in The Country Wife“ by Anne Tulloch (EN429)
“Stabilizing Experiences through Art” by Melany Su (EN203)
“Criss-Cross: Internal Focalization in Strangers on a Train“ by Emily Giroux (EN490)
“‘State of Mind’: Republicanism and Romanization in Joseph Addison’s Cato“ by Melany Su (HON300)
“The Fireworks of Doctor Faustus: Theatrical Magic and Religious Tension in Christopher Marlowe” by Jessica Butturff (EN207)
Page updated
Report abuse