This article proposes that writing instructors can present genre innovation as a strategy for asserting class (and other) identities within academic discourses. Drawing on sample student innovations of integrating emotions, expanding modes, and reconstructing audiences, this pedagogical approach seeks to value varied class identities and increase multivocality in academe.

The Truman Commission created the modern community college in 1947 to democratize our system of higher education in America. Before this moment, higher education was thoroughly segregated by race, class, and gender. The modern open-admissions two-year college cannot, therefore, be understood simply as a convenient, low-cost alternative to four-year colleges. It is—by mission and mandate—a social justice institution.

This article examines student experiences of studying Shakespeare’s first tetralogy through viewing and writing about Seattle Shakespeare Company’s 2017 Bring Down the House, a successful two-part adaptation of Henry VI parts 1, 2, and 3 directed by Rosa Joshi and the upstart crow collective, a Seattle theater company dedicated to producing classical works with diverse all-female and nonbinary casts for contemporary audiences. Through reflection on students’ responses to the adaptation’s all-female cast, as well as the analytical work they produced for an upper-level course titled Shakespeare: Context and Theory, this article articulates the pedagogical value of students’ experiences of representation in live theater performances of Shakespeare. The author argues for both the ethical imperative of introducing students to radical, inclusively cast productions and the enlivened learning that emerges in the literature classroom from students’ creative and analytical engagements with the diverse voices of modern all-female and cross-gender cast Shakespearean performance.

The article reports on a nationwide survey- and interview-based study of creative writing instructors designed to identify the extent to which the field of rhetorics and composition and key aspects of rhetorical theory have influenced the teaching of creative writing.

Classroom writing assessment practices can interrogate white supremacy through the way readers judge student writing. Furthermore, writing assessments designed and engaged in as ecologies offer social justice projects that can explore judgment as a racialized discourse. The author demonstrates one application of an antiracist writing assessment ecology through a practice called “problem posing the nature of judgment and language” and discusses the problem posing of two ecological places in the class.

Reading is a key source of anxiety in the college literature classroom. While recent debates about critical reading have reimagined the work of the literature scholar, they have not engaged the work of the literature teacher. This article explores the pedagogical limits of critique and the pedagogical potential of postcritical reading practices. Reimagining the dynamics of reading addresses, engages, and reorients students’ anxiety in the literature classroom. Diversifying the models of reading we teach allows students to more deeply engage the pleasures and anxieties of reading literature. This article concludes by offering strategies for approaching reading in the college classroom, including collaborative digital reading, creative response assignments, and publicly oriented writing.

This article examines the use of comic adaptations of Shakespeare in the college classroom. After theorizing the class offering based upon performance pedagogy and inclusive learning practices, the author describes her experience coteaching a Shakespeare class that used three Shakespeare plays in both their traditional and graphic format. The success of the course revealed that comic adaptations of Shakespeare plays offer an accessible, rewarding means of understanding Shakespeare’s plays as both texts to be read and works to be performed.

Teaching the graphic novel in English and literature courses can be a challenge, because some of the most commonly used techniques for analyzing literature are not entirely compatible with the analysis of a multimodal form like comics. Additionally, the traditional classroom can be a problematic context for the graphic novel, especially in large lecture spaces, with their unimodal, instructor-centered design. The experience of teaching graphic novels in an active learning classroom suggests that a multimodal approach placed in a learning space designed for multimodal approaches can enhance and improve the experience of teaching the graphic novel in undergraduate courses.

A reading of Inferno 32, Purgatorio 31, and Paradiso 31 compares a physical and interior pilgrimage, especially in the way in which the beginning and end of an interior journey are distinguished, to illuminate the concept of love that is central to the Divine Comedy.

Inferno 15 and Paradiso 15 are particularly suitable as a selected reading for a lower-level humanities class. Comparing Brunetto Latini and Cacciaguida as father figures and contrasting the images of Florence in each episode can help students develop a more complex understanding of Dante's poetic vision and social critiques.

This essay considers the importance of nonstandard English to fostering a more inclusive and incisive Shakespeare classroom. Grady focuses on his experience as the instructor of a Shakespeare course that occasionally employed African American Vernacular English in its analysis of texts. His reflection considers how taking such language seriously encourages more genuine participation from a wide range of students. While this pedagogical approach offers one manner in which the field of early modern studies might expand points of access and foster cross-cultural dialogue, it also stands to deepen the analytic possibilities of the Shakespeare classroom. Grady uses the example of African American Vernacular English to demonstrate that nonstandard English can offer particularly nuanced means through which to investigate and discuss Shakespeare's works.

This essay addresses education's paradoxical binding to disciplinary and hierarchical formulas and to social change and personal transformation, an irony uniquely extreme within the prison classroom. It juxtaposes two pedagogical models — one conventionally liberal, the other significantly more radical — to question the purpose and potential of prison education. In the process, the essay measures close reading, a textual practice that is also the hallmark of literary study, against the highest possible liberationist goals of the prison abolition movement.

This article discusses the convergence of the perspectives of literary, gender, and regional studies in the implementation of an oral history project as a service-learning requirement in an upper-level southern women's literature course, providing information about the model and examining learning outcomes as presented through the final projects and student reflections.

The essay argues that there is an institutional role—and obligation—to teach students to appreciate poetry. In contrast to vertical and intensive models of analysis that treat individual poems or authors as the primary unit of pedagogical value, aesthetic appreciation requires a lateral, extensive, and comparative mode of encounter.

This essay discusses the affordances of using an affect-based approach to 9/11 discourses that facilitates teaching civic engagement. Representations and rhetoric about 9/11 are found in a range of modes—film, documentary, literature, news coverage, and official government documents. Asking students to analyze these representations using a variety of rhetorical strategies highlights the way that various sources of (competing) knowledge about the national tragedy disrupt the notion that there is an accepted, uniform way of understanding this event. Furthermore, this approach demonstrates how varied sources of meaning making construct our public sphere.

This article informs educators about the importance and challenges of teaching digital reading practices. In positioning reading as a design-oriented activity and readers as text designers, instructors can teach genre awareness as a way to help students strongly engage with and comprehend digital texts.

Through a classroom moment in a graduate course in the teaching of writing, Particelli explores ways in which pointed inquiry into genre—satire, in this case—allows for a lesson design that encourages critical exploration of culture without burdening students with essentialist discussions. Using an inquiry-based approach to genre study, the students in this classroom explore many kinds of “text”—from stand-up comedy to fiction and narrative nonfiction—with an unavoidable eye toward critical theory but without the traditional approach that pushes students to apply a “critical lens” to a text in the way that a tool might be applied to an object. Particelli argues that those often didactic approaches push students to learn a specific script for a specific situation and can even push students to experience the world polemically and thus to become less willing to see complexity of argument, power, and position. Through this classroom example where the cultural habits and expectations of genre remain at the center of conversation, Particelli hopes to spark conversation surrounding the possibilities of expanding our approaches as we develop discussions at the intersections of cultural power, social politics, literature, writing, and students' personal experience.

Both creative writing and composition seek to teach writing, yet their pedagogical approaches are poles apart, especially concerning instructors. Creative writing instructors serve as “mentor-models,” whose authority comes from their writing practice rather than (only) departmental sanction. Despite potential pitfalls, a mentor-model approach could reaffirm composition instructors' identities as writers.

At 10,938 lines, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh would seem unsuited for the present-day classroom, with its focus on short, simple texts adapted for readers with little experience of long poems. Yet it teaches quite readily and, indeed, is often a student favorite. This article emphasizes the multigeneric quality of Browning's epic and the advantages of presenting its successive layers. The poem functions as a veiled autobiographical narrative of development, a fast-paced novel plot centering on gender and class relationships, and a closet drama utilizing features of the contemporary stage. Other aspects of the poem include its appeal as a travel narrative, as Aurora responds to European sites still unfamiliar to many of Browning's readers, and its self-reflexivity as a critical treatise on poetics, as Aurora attempts to enunciate the principles that have guided the poem's author. Certain aspects of the poem's imagery and characterization are especially effective in prompting classroom debate; among these are the ideologically laden symbols of a burned aristocratic manor, a blinded hero, the final vision of a New Jerusalem, and the remarkable portrayal of the aggrieved seamstress Marian, who protests her victimization by rape and rejects marriage with an upper-class suitor.

Students in freshman composition classes often assume that the goal of college writing is to sound like someone else, so they struggle to frame their own questions in response to the world around them. This article analyzes the potential for student-driven learning to redress this problem. It focuses on a team-taught freshman composition course that asked students to collaborate in designing a section of their curriculum. The article argues that control over the curriculum inspired many students to push themselves intellectually and adopt the roles of teachers. On the other hand, increased autonomy sometimes disempowered students who had not yet acquired skills to assess their own strengths and weaknesses and who thus reverted to oversimplified ideas or avoided actively taking on responsibilities. If agency constitutes the power to carry out effective action, this course illustrated the capacity of autonomy both to foster and to subvert student agency.

This article offers an innovative pedagogical technique for teaching students to think critically and analytically about race, especially for student populations most accurately characterized as white and middle class. I illustrate this technique by relating my experiences designing and teaching a first-year writing course called the Monstrous and the Human at the University of Delaware. The concept of monstrousness and the problem of race may at first appear unrelated, yet this is precisely the strength of the course, which relies on a method of defamiliarization. Course readings begin by exploring monstrousness in Victorian science fiction novels, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and then shift to a study of how conventions of these novels recur in novels that examine race in American society, such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. In combination with class discussion and course writing assignments, this reading progression invites students to see race from a new perspective. In this article I share my reasons for creating this course, detail its assignments, and show how the course can help students expand their understanding of race in American society. I argue that by teaching race through defamiliarization, we encourage students to arrive at their own understanding of race and racism without inculcating our own beliefs.

This article introduces a roundtable on teaching long poems by British women writers, presented as a special session at the 2014 Modern Language Association conference in Chicago. The articles in the roundtable provide teaching strategies that are pertinent to the writers under review but can easily be extended to many more writers and works. The resistance of students to long poems by any poet, much less by women, reveals that professors still have much work to do in establishing lesser-known women writers as coequal with their better-known male contemporaries. This resistance is a teaching opportunity to address issues of genre, gender, and canonicity. In a larger sense, the articles argue for the potential of pedagogical practice to reconstitute the canon.

This article depicts a multimodal approach to teaching Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head that has proved successful in a sophomore-level survey. As a greater romantic lyric fragment of twenty-one blank-verse paragraphs with sixty-four footnotes and two embedded rhyming poems by the “stranger” poet, Beachy Head poses many difficulties for students. Ruwe identifies student difficulties with the poem's form and content and suggests practical methods for overcoming these barriers. She provides a reading guide to the poem's various sections and suggests ways to help students experience the poem's auditory, visual, gestural, spatial, and linguistic design through a process akin to reverse engineering. The article includes student responses, handouts, and links to useful websites for a multimodal approach.

This article introduces an interdisciplinary service project performed with undergraduate literature students at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. The project, Literary Flowers, was modeled after New York City's Library Way and challenged students to plant a “literary garden” of formative voices. Further, it encouraged students to consider cultural translatability: how texts—some centuries old—fit into their final narratives today. This article provides a detailed description of the project, a consideration of its place among similar service projects, and examples of student work and response.

I address how participating as a parent in the Individualized Education Program (IEP) process has helped to transform my own approach to teaching by reinforcing how important it is to endorse a pedagogy that recognizes and values the individuality of my students. Universal Design for Instruction (UDI) has served as the best model I have found to help me move closer to my ideal classroom, and the course that most reflects this ideal classroom is my upper-level Disability and Literature course. The course's greatest strength lies in the extent to which its format and delivery are inextricably tied to its subject matter through an ethic of care(taking), especially through the incorporation of a number of UDI features into this course. What is more, while the traditional class meetings remain a privileged site of collaborative engagement and learning, the course blog is an equally crucial component to such collaboration, as the students create nearly all of its content. Indeed, the blog space serves not only as a place for students to record their responses to the assigned readings and in-class discussions but also as a student-driven supplement to the instructor-supplied focus points, a supplement that truly expands the range of possibilities implicitly represented in my choice of readings. I now understand such a pedagogical orientation not simply as a generic model for “good teaching” but as a reflection of a disability-inflected pedagogy of care.

This study exposed a major author studies class to both a reading community modeled after those popular in Charles Dickens’s own time and a digital reading community. Students gravitated toward the more traditional oral reading community over the digital project, indicating an unexpected interest in older forms of communication.

This article examines a central pedagogical dilemma within queer studies: with an increase in public attention to LGBT concerns (and an investment in the categories that comprise the LGBT rubric), how might we prioritize the complexities of queerness within a social context that tends to privilege discrete designations for identity?

English studies must confront and develop strategies to account for scholars’ and students’ unfamiliarity with geography and its precepts, or “immappancy.” This article explores the problems presented by immappancy, traces its consequences for scholarly rhetoric, and proposes two pedagogical models that can help us develop our students’ geographical knowledge.

This informed opinion piece discusses the author’s dispiriting experience filing the first hybrid dissertation at Ohio University. “Document Format Checklist” guidelines enforced a “rhetoric of distance” between pictures and words—compulsory logos-centrism. Specifications for projects like the author’s that blend images with text did not exist, and staff responsible for document approval at her graduate college insisted that she follow their guidelines. While her advisers’ communications with the graduate college and council eventually resulted in revised guidelines that included two new options for filing multimodal dissertations, her project continued to meet resistance when she tried to file it following these new options.

This article makes a case for the value of literary field studies as a way both to reframe familiar narratives about texts and to open up regions and sites to the analytic mode of close reading. The authors describe their experiences teaching a seminar and week-long field study exploring the literature and culture of the American South.

Review Article| October 01 2014 The Multimodal Turn in Higher Education: On Teaching, Assessing, Valuing Multiliteracies Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres. Edited by Bowen, Tracey and Whithaus, Carl. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Lauri Bohanan Goodling Lauri Bohanan Goodling Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2014) 14 (3): 561–568. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2715859 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lauri Bohanan Goodling; The Multimodal Turn in Higher Education: On Teaching, Assessing, Valuing Multiliteracies. Pedagogy 1 October 2014; 14 (3): 561–568. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2715859 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 by Lauri Bohanan Goodling2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

This coauthored article argues that a team-taught format can make the literature survey more engaging and meaningful for students while also addressing some of the course’s traditional challenges. The article fills a gap in team-teaching scholarship, which emphasizes interdisciplinary and/or loosely collaborative arrangements over intensely collaborative models like the one the authors propose.

Over the last two decades, a growing body of scholarship has examined how whiteness is socially constructed as “objective” and “neutral” in the US and elsewhere. This article seeks to trouble such a position for white teachers in the multiracial classroom, particularly those that focus on multiethnic literatures. Drawing upon scholarship in critical whiteness studies, personal experiences with students, and reflections on multicultural literature, this article advances an educational philosophy of investment wherein privilege and subjectivity are made legible in the learning process. In this model, educators and students work toward the discomfort that often comes from recognizing the risks and rewards of acknowledging one’s positioning within a racial order.

Drawing on the author’s experience at the University of Pristina in Kosovo, the article narrates writing-to-learn strategies designed to help students to navigate a thematic approach to twentieth-century American poetry. The piece also situates this narration within the ongoing disciplinary debate on how and why students should learn to read literature.

The article traces ideas of improvisation in Quintilian’s rhetorical work, presents an interdisciplinary literature review of improvisation studies, and surveys modern disciplines that teach improvisation, all with the goal of implementing these ideas into a first-year, college-writing pedagogy.

The “Influence” model of introductory literature class focuses on a single central text, the works that influenced its composition, and works that developed from it, encouraging students to make connections among texts. Such a course model repositions power in the classroom by offering students the opportunity to participate in list creation.

This essay provides an approach to teaching T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The approach is designed to disassociate the student from the annotation usually provided by either Eliot or an editor. The assignment is presented in multiple frameworks and hopes to make students deal with the poem’s specific lines. The process described has students identify voice shifts in the poem. It is certainly true that there are differing opinions about voice in The Waste Land, but the point of the assignment is not to involve the student in this debate (at least initially). The explicit pedagogical goal of the approach described in this essay is to enable students to develop their own views on the poem and to create a reading that is independent of editorial direction. This develops their ability to read critically and increases their comfort level with a difficult text.

Public writing spaces, such as blogs and social media sites, are expanding quickly with new websites, web applications, and other interfaces constantly available to users. As these digital composing spaces continue to expand, it is important that writers are capable of operating within them, yet many composition students lack the rhetorical awareness to present effective arguments in multimodal digital interfaces. To address this issue, the author designed a project to introduce students to public writing while reflecting on the implications of the permanence of their writing, the searchability of these public spaces, and their responsibility as writers. This project began by asking students to reflect on their own online personae, be it through Facebook profiles, personal blogs, or online class forums. Utilizing websites like Yelp and YouTube offered students the opportunity to see how others present themselves online and the effectiveness of composers in these digital spaces. Taught in an online course format, this project demonstrates how writing can live outside of the traditional classroom space and contribute to the students’ community. For the writing teacher, it creates the occasion to delve into students’ understandings of ethics in online writing while illustrating the rhetorical components necessitated by composing in digital media.

Why would an English professor enroll in an upper-level biology class? This article describes an experiment in interdisciplinarity: an English professor takes a class titled Scientific Imaging in order to enhance her teaching of nature writing. The author outlines thirteen specific lessons imparted by her experience as a student in a class devoted to photographing elements of the natural world and creating images suitable for scientific presentation, and then she explains how she adapted the principles from Scientific Imaging for use in a creative nonfiction class focusing on nature writing. The article concludes with a discussion of the results of this interdisciplinary experiment and suggestions for promoting interdisciplinary learning as a mode of faculty development.

This article presents the authors’ innovative approach to the challenges of teaching students in a large lecture survey course to perform effective close readings, and sets forth a rigorous qualitative assessment of students’ learning. It describes a combination of teaching strategies integrated to encourage students’ skills acquisition as well as content mastery, and to make the course writing intensive without also being grading intensive. It demonstrates the effectiveness of these strategies by analyzing evidence of student learning. The authors advocate for an instructional model that gives students ample opportunity for active learning and for practicing close reading skills. The authors conclude with a brief coda calling for more scholarship and reflection on faculty-graduate student collaboration in both scholarship and teaching.

In this article R. F. Yeager offers a history of the development of the John Gower Society, by way of encouraging others who seek a process model by which wider audiences, and classroom recognition, for currently little-read texts and authors can be obtained.

This project employs a student-generated geographic database that links the Commedia to relevant passages from Dino Compagni’s Cronica and visual records at appropriate locations in Florence. The database records evidence for social structure, physical infrastructure, and historic events, as well as the civic/religious ritual of the city, in order to consider the broader meanings of the built environment. This database is displayed on satellite images of the city using the open-source SIMILE widget Exhibit. The student can then analyze this evidence and consider how Dante constructed his allegorical societies, infernal, purgative, and paradisiacal, from the life of his contemporary Florence. It is suggested that this permits more rapid immersion into the dynamic of the poem and enables more effectively focused student research.

Introducing Dante in a course on medieval visuality positioned the Commedia in relation to medieval women’s visionary and mystical literature. This article suggests how a comparison of the Commedia with this literature, particularly the works of Hildegard of Bingen, can illuminate the visionary mode of writing that Dante employed.

Survey courses on the history of rhetoric, especially as taught in American universities, often concentrate on classical and modern rhetoric, neglecting the way in which rhetoric was understood during the Middle Ages. This essay offers the teacher of the history of rhetoric a pedagogical answer to the question of how to incorporate medieval rhetoric within courses on the history of rhetoric, by providing a close reading of three symmetrical cantos of Dante’s Commedia that are specifically concerned with the ethics of persuasive discourse.

This article argues for a more complex understanding of interdisciplinary pedagogy in English studies. Drawing on the authors’ experience designing and coteaching a graduate-level interdisciplinary course in “statistical literacy,” the article forwards a view of interdisciplinary pedagogy as a complex relational process of faculty and student learning.

This article focuses on the uses of the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database as a case study for how to introduce undergraduates to archival research. I provide four cases in which working with the digital archive has allowed my students to attend to variations in typography, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and overall design in early modern printed texts. Working with the EEBO database challenges students to reconsider how a printed text represents a series of editorial choices; it encourages them to make persuasive claims about the differences in the appearance of an early modern lyric or dramatic text when it is situated in different contexts; it enhances the students’ ability to work independently and derive pleasure from the serendipity of the archive; and perhaps most important, it can actually help students develop a clearer and more effective practice of close reading in the twenty-first century.

This article interrogates the commonly used creative writing workshop model, calling for a higher degree of process-oriented work in the classroom and bringing to light process-oriented models already in place in universities across the country. This discussion can serve as a springboard for classroom development of alternative teaching models.

Poster sessions aren't just for professional conferences. They are popular in a variety of academic disciplines, where they have been shown to boost motivation, foster alternative assessment, and promote peer interaction. They are gaining popularity as a classroom teaching strategy, because they promote the development of student research skills and foster positive attitudes toward research. They encourage collaboration and peer interaction. Visual presentation strategies provide opportunities for students to display their ideas and knowledge in several multimedia formats. Poster sessions also promote alternative assessment strategies such as peer and self-assessment. We report here on the ways that we have used this assignment format in our basic linguistics class, titled “The Nature of Language.” We conclude with tips on incorporating poster assignments into teacher education classes regardless of the content matter.

This essay argues for an interdisciplinary, team-taught approach to the Introduction to Graduate Studies course in which faculty from literary and rhetoric/writing studies model the intersections of both fields through course texts, assignments, and theoretical frameworks. The authors also discuss the role of terminal master's programs in English and the need for graduate writing instruction.