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Tag: Department of English

Teaching Through Re-Reading

main web page view of mill marginalia online

by Albert D. Pionke, Department of English Although not specifically designed with the classroom in mind, Mill Marginalia Online offers instructors in philosophy, history, law, Classics, and English and European literature and culture the opportunity to incorporate Digital Humanities research results and methods into their courses. Each of these major subject areas is amply represented in nineteenth-century philosopher and liberal theorist John Stuart Mill’s personal library. Mill Marginalia Online seeks to digitize all of the handwritten marks and annotations found […]

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Piloting ePortfolios in the First-Year Writing Program

Students working on ePortfolios in Dr. Kidd's classroom.

by Jessica Fordham Kidd, Department of English On February 22, 2019, Natalie Loper, Brooke Champagne, and I participated in the Faculty Technology Showcase with a presentation on the First-Year Writing Program’s (FWP) ePortfolio Pilot program, which is in its second semester. This ePortfolio initiative was inspired by Dr. Kathleen Blake Yancey’s visit to UA in February 2018 when she presented “EPortfolios for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment.” Her faculty website lists her recent scholarship, much of it related to ePortfolios. The […]

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Writing Across Media: A Hands-On Exploration of New Literacies

Cartoon created by a student in EN 313

by Donna Branyon, Department of English In English 313: Writing Across Media (WAM) fall 2018, we examined modes of communicating, identified the conventions of media, and created several multimedia presentations. We looked at new media theories, including topics such as process, authorship, affect, design, and multimodality. Additionally, we spent a great deal of time exploring the intersections between various media: print, film, images, sound, social media, and web design. We considered the ways writing (and communicating in general) is shaped […]

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Marshmallow Launchers Spur Student Writing

Students firing marshmallow launchers on the Quad

by Donna Branyon, Department of English For the final project in EN 102 (freshman composition) and EN 319 (technical writing), we do versions of the marshmallow launcher project. Students are presented with an imaginary rhetorical situation: The UA Writing Center provides snacks for clients and consultants. They would like to be known as the most congenial department on campus, so they want to provide snacks as quickly as possible. Because the Writing Center is woefully understaffed, consultants can no longer […]

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Teaching Outside the Classroom

Deborah Weiss talking with students during a class

by Deborah Weiss, Department of English At the beginning of the semester, a former student, Bonnie, sent me a link to an article entitled “Spirit Guides” from Slate, which was excerpted from William Deresiewicz’s book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. In the article, Deresiewicz discusses the role of college teachers outside the classroom as mentors who give students “what their parents can’t: the permission to go their own way and […]

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World Literature Class Awards Book Prize

Instructor: Emily Wittman Course: World Literature (EN 411) Audience: Undergraduates Making significant use of Web 2.0 technology, I run my English 411 course, a senior-level seminar in comparative & world literature, as a prize-granting panel, modeled loosely on the Nobel Prize committee. We read seven or eight critically acclaimed contemporary novels from across the globe, rank them according to criteria we come up with ourselves, and then vote collectively for a winner at the end of our course. What are […]

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Teaching Grammar with Corpus Studies

Students in Dilin Liu's class

Instructor: Dilin Liu Course: Structure and Usage (EN 424/524) Audience: Undergraduate and graduate students Structure and Usage is an advanced course on English grammar and usages, mainly using contemporary linguistic approaches, such as cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics (i.e., the study of language using large-sized computer-searchable collections of language data), functional linguistics, and the lexicogrammar approach, which treats lexis and grammar as the two ends of one continuum rather than as two separate domains (the view held by traditional linguistic approaches). What are your […]

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Faculty Spotlight: Jessica Kidd

Jessica Kidd

What are your favorite teaching strategies?  My favorite teaching strategies are getting students to make something and then getting them to reflect on that process of making. When I teach freshman composition courses, I want students to write essays and then think back to how/why they made the choices they did to create those essays. After students have written an essay, I might give them a follow-up reflection assignment that asks them to identify two or three key choices they made to appeal to the essay’s audience. In response, students […]

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