As a sound studies scholar, I am always looking for ways to bring sound into my classroom. I play recordings of wild birds, amphibians, and other animals for my students when we read early American authors writing about the "howling" wilderness, about dangerous adventures into the forest where goblins and witches seduce wandering souls into … Continue reading Bringing Kashema Hutchinson’s Hip-Hop Pedagogy into the Early American Lit Survey
American Literature
Fold/Unfold Close Reading Activity
This post is a modified version of "Unfolding Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall and Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Birthmark'," a paper I presented at the American Literature Association conference in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 23, 2019. To unfold something is to open or unwrap, attempt to undo its folds. However, a fold can’t really be undone: when … Continue reading Fold/Unfold Close Reading Activity
“A remaking of the mind itself”: Margaret Fuller’s Pedagogy & Mine
Teaching Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century is instructive in its challenge. The text contains numerous references that take students to task with additional research to understand the import of its anecdotes. The text’s oscillation between essentialism and radical gender fluidity can also perplex the student who expects a linear argument one would find … Continue reading “A remaking of the mind itself”: Margaret Fuller’s Pedagogy & Mine
Reading American Romanticism with Students after the Election
"What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity--who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority. The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls--the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on … Continue reading Reading American Romanticism with Students after the Election
American Lit: Collaborative Writing & Group Work
This semester as I prepared my syllabus for the American Literature: Origins to the Civil War course, I wanted to get my students more engaged in collaborative multi-modal projects. One of these was to write a blog post comparing the American Puritans to one religious group from the HBO series The Game of Thrones. While students cringed … Continue reading American Lit: Collaborative Writing & Group Work
Addressing Despair in the Classroom: An Ecocritical Approach to Non-Canonical American Writers
Pedagogy and American Literary Studies (PALS) invited me last month to write a guest post on teaching the American Literature Survey Course. While collaborating and making edits, the wonderful team at PALS gave me an opportunity to write a second post about something else that happened in the course. Take a look:
A Week on the Appalachian Trail Reading Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau writes in "Walking," that every walk is a crusade, and declares sauntering an art. I set out this summer to hike about 1,000 miles of the Appalachian Trail, bringing a copy of Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers with me for the first 100 miles. I've spent more of … Continue reading A Week on the Appalachian Trail Reading Thoreau
Student-Driven Pedagogy in the Early American Survey Course
Teaching PALS was kind enough to let me write a guest post on Student-Driven Pedagogy in the Early American Survey Course for their blog. Check it out!
Using BuzzFeed to Teach Melville
Teaching an American Literature survey course for the first time last semester, I wanted to take on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick both for myself and for my students. My students were mostly English majors, and had followed Hope Leslie and Hawk-Eye through the American wilderness with me earlier in the semester. The magnetic pull to read Moby-Dick and give the potential spiritual journey … Continue reading Using BuzzFeed to Teach Melville
Survey Expectations
The PDFs have been uploaded to Blackboard, the syllabi have been printed, stapled, and handed out, and names have been learned (well, mostly) as the daunting task of teaching a large survey course is underway this fall. We're merely scratching the surface at a breakneck pace, reading American literature from the early explorers to the … Continue reading Survey Expectations
