Abstract Although the collected essays in this special issue were not expressly intended to address the impact of the digital environment on current pedagogies, all the contributions demonstrate in one way or another how computer-based communication modifies the work of teachers and students. Using the key concepts of hybridity, spatiality, connectivity, and user response, this essay describes how the internet, as the dominant twenty-first-century medium for knowledge exchange, has become the filter through which medieval ideas are presented and received. Hybridity refers to a teaching approach that combines face-to-face with virtual, computer-mediated (and often asynchronous) methods, whereas an awareness of spatiality emerges from the advanced geo-location tools now used unthinkingly. Connectivity allows for the creation of virtual communities and communications among their members, while user response refers to the many ways that the digital world supports and even encourages input about computer-based ideas. Since the medieval and digital eras share many characteristics not found in cultures of print communication, making such connections, and thereby crumpling the timeline, can often be automatic and perhaps even unintentional for instructors. The methods described in all the contributions demonstrate the validity of medieval themes for the modern world, which in turn can be effective tools to reach learners beyond traditional academic settings.

Abstract Christy Tidwell reflects on the shift from teaching in person to teaching online asynchronous classes during COVID-19. This shift involved a combination of labor-based grading and using Discord as a central space for the class, both of which aimed to center and engage students and relationships with students rather than further automate the class. Tidwell concludes by commenting on ways that these tools and techniques remain useful even when returning to the in-person classroom.

AbstractThis article explores some pedagogical challenges and opportunities introduced by higher education's increased reliance on private learning management systems (LMS) during the COVID-19 pandemic. It theorizes LMS as an expression of neoliberalism and argues that critical literacy, as a method, should be done to (rather than simply through) LMS. Specifically, it examines two case studies of student interactions with the LMS during an asynchronous first-year writing course.

AbstractThis essay argues that the emphasis on spoken contributions in English and other humanities courses can exclude disabled students. The COVID-19 pandemic's necessitation of online learning has forced instructors to offer students multiple entry points for conversation—not only through spoken dialogue but also text threads, anonymous polls, and communal annotation assignments. Instructors’ shifts in participation guidelines both before and at the height of the pandemic reveal faculty members’ adoption of a disability justice pedagogy that privileges flexibility. Drawing on these transformations, the author offers pragmatic suggestions for how to value course contributions beyond students’ capacity to voice their reflections aloud. The relinquishment of rigid academic expectations for participation makes space not just for students with disabilities but also for other minority populations, including women students, nonbinary students, first-generation students, and students of color who contribute their expertise in more capacious ways than the standard, discussion-based classroom allows. To conclude, the author considers how instructors might replicate accessible online tools—from Zoom chats to asynchronous platforms—in the return to face-to-face teaching. These new and primarily virtual forms of engagement reframe participation not as individual contributions to conversation, but as ongoing work intended for the purpose of community growth and collective care.

AbstractInstructors of writing-intensive disciplines infrequently integrate cinematic media in composition curricula. Furthermore, when instructors use films in composition courses, they often treat films merely as supplemental texts tangentially relevant to course topics and prioritize teaching content rather than media or filmmaking. This pedagogical approach overlooks an opportunity to ask students to consider how the audiovisual rhetorical efforts can meaningfully harmonize or create dissonance with the content. In this research study, the author argues that students are active media consumers engaging frequently with media as a form of composition. He navigates the limitations of Gregory Ulmer and Lev Manovitch, whose early work stressing the primacy of media literacies in composition classrooms is nonetheless seminal to the author's larger claims of film's educational import. The author relates the results of the IRB-approved research of his composition students, who offer feedback about the use of film in the class. The author calls for greater attention to film instruction and curricula development for collegiate composition classrooms, urging educators to move beyond film's supplemental use and toward more educationally fruitful practices, including teaching active watching and basic film analysis. Film is a critical form of cultural communication and media, and the author contends that it is a pivotal part of the landscape of twenty-first century literacy engagements.

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.

In this article, the author discusses his experiences teaching a class on the Vietnam War, a controversial subject that divided a nation along generational, class, and racial lines. He argues that learning takes place in the encounter of differences — where students consider perspectives, worldviews, and cultures different from their own. As a literature teacher, he claims to use writings by American soldiers and journalists, North and South Vietnamese soldiers, Vietnamese Buddhists, and ethnic American poets in order to have students reflect on the many perspectives on the war, perspectives that may challenge their preconceived notions about Vietnam, likely deriving from family, history, and cultural productions such as Hollywood films. In teaching this class, he discovered that, like his students, his views were interpolated by history, politics, and culture; to teach ethically, he had to reflect on his own subject positions as both an Asian American, who identifies with the struggle of other minorities, and a Cambodian, who must come to terms with his country’s historical tensions with Vietnam. Overall, the article demonstrates the importance of humanities teaching — where students learn, through language, creativity, and the imagination, to reflect on the experiences of other people and become responsible world citizens.

Courses on ethnic American literature can unintentionally reinscribe students' preconceptions and stereotypes about ethnic American subgroups or create the false impression that each ethnic group is homogeneous. A student with limited experience with people of color might think she now understands an ethnic group after reading an ethnic American novel, for example. By using fiction and non-fiction film, teachers can destabilize students' oversimplified views of ethnic groups and of the concepts of race and ethnicity themselves. The course described here started with Toni Morrison's short story, “Recitatif,” which ingeniously leads readers to examine their own racial preconceptions. Then, novels (Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, Sent for You Yesterday by John Wideman, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen) are paired with films to demonstrate that greater diversity exists within any ethnic group than between any two. Students also engage a few key articles about canon formation so they can understand ethnic literature in the context of American literary traditions. By the end of the course, students have a healthy uncertainty regarding race and ethnicity, their oversimplifications having been undermined by their work with diverse texts.

Creating a group paper has always made unusual demands on students as they figure out their role in the process of collaborative authorship. Inviting writers to work with newer technologies, such as online word processors and wikis, can provide opportunities to make the process and outcomes of collaboration more transparent. In this article, collaborative writing approaches that use a number of Web-based tools are discussed, including cooperative synchronous writing with Google Docs, inquiry-based writing with wikis, multigenre writing in response to literature, and collaboratively constructed study guides.

This article argues that introducing undergraduates to literary criticism and theory can be most effectively accomplished through the teaching of children's literature, fantasy literature, and Disney films alongside traditional literary criticism. We discuss a series of assignments we use in Pursuits of English, our department's introductory theory and criticism course.