My Teaching Methodologies
Below are sample assignments and activities that demonstrate my teaching philosophy at work. There are three sections: methods I use in all classes; methods specifically for traditional, in-person classes; and methods specifically for remote learning.
“Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.”
—Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (U Minnesota P, 1984), 110.
Methods for all classes
Creating Unconventional Projects
To support my belief that writing assignments should be spaces for students to practice and hone new strategies of analysis and problem solving, I generate original and unconventional challenges for my students. Especially in my literature classes, I encourage students to break away from restrictive forms of writing (like the five paragraph essay), and instead to choose for themselves which structures and organization strategies will work best for their intended purpose. The following examples demonstrate my method of using formal writing assignments to foster critical thinking, creative problem solving, and flexible thinking even while assessing literary analysis, reading comprehension, and communication.
Oppression Journals & Explication
In 3401, Law through Literature, students read Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novel The Handmaid’s Tale. This is a first person narrative about a society in which women’s social role is determined by their reproductive abilities. The book raises themes of oppression, corruption, and rebellion, and it does so through the powerful lens of a narrator who is experiencing those themes herself. To help students engage with this text, I assign a two-part formal project. In the first part, students write their own Oppression Journal. I ask them to imitate Atwood’s strategies by writing in the first person about an oppressive situation in today’s society. Among other topics, students have written about immigration, policing, domestic abuse, and Syrian refugees. They post their texts to our Open Lab site. In the second part of the project, students perform literary analysis via an annotation and explication of a classmate’s oppression journal. In their explication, they must comparatively analyze Atwood’s text and the classmate’s journal. Then they post their explication as a comment on the student’s journal on Open Lab.
This assignment lets students develop the close reading and analytical skills necessary in an upper-level literature class while at the same time developing the empathy that the appreciation of literature demands. The assignment allows students the opportunity to understand the structures of power that can oppress populations, and it allows them to realize that authors must make a series of decisions when they try to portray such situations. Finally, it scaffolds the process of literary analysis, allowing them to analyze Atwood’s novel through the familiarity of writing and responding to peer-generated texts in the same genre.
Click here to see the assignment instructions.
Podcast Transcripts
In 3401, Law through Literature, students listen to the podcast Serial, a twelve-episode study of the case of Adnan Syed. Syed was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend in Baltimore and had served 15 years of a life sentence when Sarah Koenig, the podcast journalist, began investigating the case and his conviction. She uncovered problems with the investigation and with Syed’s defense. Because of the podcast, Syed has been granted a new trial.
Students really enjoy this text and come to class eager to discuss it; the text we read after it – Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – gets a far more chilly reception. To help students recognize the shared themes between the texts, such as investigation, corruption, power, innocence, and the power of narrative itself, I ask students to write a transcript of a podcast in which they take on Koenig’s role as investigative journalist and travel back to 17th-century Salem to find out what really happened. The assignment brings students into the text and encourages them to try to understand characters’ motives.
Click here to see the assignment instructions.
Writing About Literature and Your Major
Because it’s important to me that my students see the work of our class in the context of their entire education (and, honestly, their lives in general), I ask them to identify and write about one of those connections. This assignment asks students to write about the ways in which a science fiction text (Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles) could be used to teach an aspect of their major or career. The assignment is intended to help students understand that literature contains more substance than what is most visible in the plot.
Click here to see the assignment instructions from 2016.
Click here to see the assignment instructions from 2022.
Scaffolding Writing Assignments
WAC principles (and decades of WAC research) encourage scaffolding large projects, so students aren’t overwhelmed by the work, and so they can practice the discreet actions that comprise the writing process (like researching, drafting, outlining, revising, and seeking peer review). In the examples below, you can see the ways I’ve broken down large assignments to support student curiosity, effort, and stick-to-it-tiveness.
Click here to see the research assignment in ENG 1101, the Muhammad Ali section.
Click here to see the advocacy project in ENG 3401.
Click here to see peer review instructions for a remote asynchronous class.
Deconstructing Complex Skills
IQIAA
When I was in graduate school, I developed this process as a way to discuss quotation usage in papers. While at City Tech, I’ve developed an activity that engages students in this process physically, visually, and aurally. It was a City Tech student who suggested the acronym IQIAA be pronounced like the furniture store IKEA, so I now call it the IQIAA method.
The acronym stands for Introduce, Quote, Interpret, Analyze, and Apply. Pointing out that all five words are verbs, I present it as a tool box of actions an author can take with any quotation. I’ve used a handout to teach the method, and a puzzle activity to give students the chance to practice it.
Click here to see the IQIAA handout, or view my recorded instructions here.
“Teaching is a performative act. And it is that aspect of our work that offers the space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique elements in each classroom.”
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Routledge, 1994), 11.
Methods for Classroom Teaching
Engaging Students Through Play
In her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks writes about the ways that the worst classrooms of her own educational experience solidified for her a pedagogy that foregrounds excitement. She writes, “Critical reflection on my experience as a student in unexciting classrooms enabled me not only to imagine that the classroom could be exciting but that this excitement could co-exist with and even stimulate serious intellectual and/or academic engagement” (7). I’ve long maintained that low-stakes, playful activities provide space for students to “try on” new ideas or examine complicated ones. Below are some of my favorite classroom activities.
Meet-Match-Teach
For this lesson, students come to class having already read an assigned essay by Ann Charters on the elements of fiction (plot, theme, point of view, characters, style, and setting). At the start of class, students receive two cards or signs; one has a term from Charters’s essay, and the other has a definition. Each student’s term and definition will not match. By walking around the room and engaging other students, they must find the correct definition for their term, and the correct term for their definition, leaving each student with two cards at the end: a matching term and definition.
Cards are color coded, so when students have found the matching term and definition, they can create groups based on the color of their cards; there are six groups, each one focused on a single element of fiction. These groups work together to determine the best way to teach their element to the rest of the class, using as an example a text they think most of the class will know. Each group affixes the signs to the wall with Bluestick.
Frankenstein Bingo
Because the elevated style of Mary Shelley’s novel can be intimidating for some students, I find that games can help to reduce the stress and to provide areas of access where the students can gain footholds. I use a bingo game to help students identify important themes and how they relate to other elements of fiction (like setting, style, characterization, and point of view), which helps them to gain a level of familiarity with this difficult text.
To play the game, students begin by selecting one sentence to write on an index card I distribute. There is an alphanumeric code at the top of each card which corresponds to a specific chapter of the text. Students must select their quotation according to this general direction. They submit their cards to me (I often ask them to generate more than one), and I draw from them at random. Students then work in teams to determine if any particular quotation can fill a spot on their bingo card. In order to do this, a quotation must represent an intersection between the specific theme across the top of the card, and the element of fiction listed in the column on the left. When a team has a line completed, they yell “BINGO!” and must defend their readings of each quotation to the rest of the class.
This activity gets students working in groups to understand individual sentences of a difficult text. The focus on a single sentence isolates it for the students, who can then begin to put it into the context of concepts they already know. Having to defend their readings also develops their argumentation skills, and teaches them how to analyze quotations in ways that support their overall purpose. Of course, this latter skill is incredibly important when writing formal papers. Click here to see the Bingo cards.
Jeopardy
I use a template I found online, and create Jeopardy games to use for review. Students work in teams to answer questions (or, technically, to answer in the form of a question). The template allows for five categories of increasingly difficult questions. I populate the template with questions and answers based on the purpose of the review.
The classic Jeopardy grid shows the categories across the top row. Student teams select the points value for the question they’d like to hear next. Any team can answer a question once it’s read. Questions require students to understand the reading as well as the connections to other assigned texts and to current events.
Answers often give me the chance to elaborate on an important topic, especially if no one provides the correct answer. In this way, the “game” lets me see which areas students are proficient with, and which areas need more class discussion.
Debates
In my composition courses and in my literature courses, I use debates to provide a structure for argumentation. I choose a polarizing question, assign students to a team, and give them time to prepare their statements. The debates encourage team work, careful reading, making connections among various readings or different elements of fiction, and effective quotation usage, and they introduce the idea of addressing one’s opponents when defending one’s own argument. Students may only be responsible for one round of a debate, so their work is focused on just one part of the whole, but they are part of a team that they want to see win, so they need to understand how their individual statement fits into the larger argument or purpose.
“Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar.”
—Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987, 1999, aunt lute books), x.
Methods for Remote Teaching
Recorded Lectures
Below are selected videos in which I deliver organized lectures on course topics or assignments. I use YouTube for final processing of videos because it provides closed captioning if the viewer chooses.
A weekly lecture for English 2001: Introduction to Literature — Fiction
A video explaining the steps of the term paper in English 2001, Introduction to Literature — Fiction
A lecture from a summer section of English 3401, Law through Literature
Using Perusall for Asynchronous Discussions
In an asynchronous online class, it can be hard to replicate the dialogic moment of textual discussion. While certainly not a replacement, Perusall allows me and the students to discuss specific parts of the assigned readings. I can pose questions for students or they can react to each other’s interpretations. They can even comment on videos.
