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
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!
+ afropunk, assignment, composition, music, Pedagogy, punk, zine
This semester, I am teaching Kathleen Hanna’s Rebel Girl and Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl. Since I am teaching two memoirs by musicians who came of age and still work within the punk and indie scene, I wanted students to make zines for one of their projects. I have always thought about having students make zines in class; however, I have never had the opportunity … Read More Zine Assignment in the Composition Classroom
+ education, jason stanley, Kristen Ghodsee, lillian e smith, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy, ta-nehisi coates
“Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes this sentence amidst thinking about a school district in South Carolina debating whether or not to ban his book Between the World and Me and to fire the teacher, Mary, who assigned it in her Advanced Placement English course. As I reread The Message alongside Kristen Ghodsee’s Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from … Read More Why Do You Fear Education?: Why We Must Imagine a New World
Interminable Rambling 