This semester, I am teaching a literature and composition course centered around short stories collections. For this course, I chose writers specific to the region where we are located in Appalachia, with one obvious outlier from Louisiana. Students read Frank Yerby, Ernest Gaines, Crystal Wilkinson, Dorothy Allison, and Ron Rash. As I worked on the syllabus for this course, I kept thinking about the … Read More Short Story Anthology Assignment
I have taught, in some form, for a quarter century. I have taught high school course and for most of that time I have taught in higher education. I have taught countless first generation students, numerous non-traditional students, and students from various different economic, religious, and racial backgrounds. As such, over the course of my career I have developed strategies to make my classroom … Read More How to Make Our Classroom Welcoming for All
The following are some thoughts for a presentation I and a colleague did about plagiarism for our university’s professional development. We wanted, through this presentation, to highlight our experiences as composition teachers with over 30 years of combined experience and how we need to, across disciplines, think about plagiarism. This is not exhaustive, and we do not deal with AI. However, we do think … Read More “Give credit where it’s due”: How to Approach Plagiarism in the Classroom
When your mom told me she was pregnant with you, I was petrified. Even though we wanted to have a baby, I wasn’t truly ready. But, is anyone truly ready? I kept thinking about how I might mess up and cause you harm, either by dropping you on the ground (which did happen) or by hindering you from reaching your full potential. As you’ve … Read More Letter to My Daughter
As I began discussing in my previous post, Project 2025 will have a damaging impact on individuals’ access to higher education. This has been a long standing goal of conservatives, as Fabiola Cineas points out at Vox. The goal is to limit access to universities and to return them, in many ways, to places that will, as Lauren Lassabe Shepherd mentions when speaking with Cineas and describing … Read More What Does Project 2025 Say About Higher Education?: Part II
Interminable Rambling 