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
Whenever I work on a syllabus, I always have some amorphous idea for a theme and for the texts I want to use in the course. For introductory composition courses where the goal is to teach students to write argumentative essays and move towards the incorporation of sources into their work, I always structure the course around personal narratives because, for me, starting by … Read More Personal Memoir Syllabus
Over the past few days, I’ve had to pull together a literature and composition course for the fall semester. As I thought about the course, I moved from Appalachian literature with writers such as Crystal Wilkinson, David Joy, and S.A. Cosby to mystery novels with Cosby and others to my already planned “The Reverberations of World War II” syllabus for a more introductory course. … Read More “Who Watches Superheroes?” Syllabus
Interminable Rambling 