Category: Pedagogy

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“We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans”: Bossier Massacre Graphic Text

Whenever I have a course that focuses on comics or graphic narratives, I usually have students create their own graphic text. For this assignment, students have the choice of either doing a script or an actual, completed graphic text. They can work solo or together, use photos, and essentially approach the assignment in any way they want to approach it. This semester, I assigned this … Read More “We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans”: Bossier Massacre Graphic Text

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Short Story Anthology Assignment

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

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How to Make Our Classroom Welcoming for All

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

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Fascism in Literature Syllabus

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about constructing a fascism in literature syllabus. Right now, I keep going back and forth on whether or not to focus specifically on American literature or to expand it and make it a world literature course. For this post, I am doing the latter because I feel that reading novels about fascism in a broader context … Read More Fascism in Literature Syllabus

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We Must Transform the World!

In “The White Christian and His Conscience,” Lillian Smith breaks down the ways that religion, specifically Christianity, works to maintain power and how it causes individuals to lose their conscience, causing them to live, ostensibly, with the warring teachings of Jesus and the white supremacist society they exist within. Smith, also, presents readers with analogies between Southern white Christians and Nazi Germany, at one … Read More We Must Transform the World!