The Thesis Statement as The Key to Unlock Essay Writing

by Julia Lewandoski, History Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 After several semesters as a GSI and Reader for history classes, it has become clear to me that a concise, clear, and specific thesis statement is essential to a successful student paper. Developing a strong thesis statement enables students to frame Continue Reading >>

Constructing Live Knowledge from Dead Civilizations

by Eduardo A. Escobar, Near Eastern Studies Recipient of the Teagle Foundation Award for Excellence in Enhancing Student Learning, 2016 Related Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay: Live Digital Translation for Dead Languages Benno Landsberger, one of the founders of modern Cuneiform Studies, believed that to examine a cuneiform tablet from ancient Continue Reading >>

Live Digital Translation for Dead Languages

by Eduardo A Escobar, Near Eastern Studies Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 The problem of translation remains one of the most enduring challenges for scholars of literary cultures. Translating texts from any historical period can be a challenge, but reading texts from the “dead” civilizations of the ancient world, including Continue Reading >>

A People’s History of the English Language: Dialect Communities

by Matthew Sergi, English
Composition students tend to approach punctuation, grammar, usage, and spelling standards through unquestioning (and usually futile) rote memorization…In my R1B section, I combined Howard Zinn’s People’s History techniques with a traditional History of the English Language syllabus, demonstrating to my students that the rules of good English have always been, and are still, changing and subject to conflict, politics, and urgent debate.

Shaking up the Standard in a Course on French Phonetics

by David Divita, French
Students were expected to learn the phonetic rules of “standard” French, but they were not encouraged to reflect on the historical origins and political implications of such a construct. Whose standard were they learning? Who had the authority to claim it as such? In a course designed to teach “correct” pronunciation, it seemed to me such questions could not remain unasked.

Poetry and the Scientific Method

by Hillary Gravendyk, English
I was … impressed to find myself in a room full of well-trained environmental studies, engineering, and biochemistry majors who were fearless (it seemed to me) in the face of those mysteries of math and science that had so baffled me as a college student. But I quickly realized that there was one thing about which these poised young scientists were utterly perplexed, even terrified: poetry.

Writers into Readers

by Charles Scott Combs, Film Studies
Though I teach Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” as an illustrious example of how criticism broadens our regard of fictional works, the essay threatens to plunge class thought and discussion into an abyss…The problem I face is the temptation students have to read Barthes’ criticism (and the majority of criticism in general)…as an overly-simplified polytheism of reader pleasure.