by Sarah Chihaya, Comparative Literature How could I possibly communicate the intertextual quality central to the novel’s style to my students, when most of them didn’t have the exhaustive literary and historical background that Pynchon’s proliferating cultural references — which swing wildly from erudite literary digs, to Sixties-specific pop cultural allusions, to puerile humor — seem to demand?
by Lynn Huang, English I realized that students did not understand the difference between evidence and analysis in their own writing....I introduced the idea that we can “dissect” and analytically color-code an essay in order to make its internal structure visible, and to determine what makes it an effective (or ineffective) paper.
by Catherine Cronquist Browning, English It was clear that students who knew the abstract definition of “plagiarism” had trouble recognizing it in practical examples; discussing the different forms of plagiarism in the sample paragraphs helped them understand what it means to assert their own writerly voices and hold these distinct from other critics and thinkers.
by Gina Zupsich, French For my students, gender was, and had always been, a personal choice. The queer literature we were studying was fantasy indeed to students in a post-feminist world on an LGTBQ-friendly campus....If we were to understand the radical messages of our texts, I realized that I would have to put these theories into historical perspective and in living color.
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.
by Natalia Cecire, English The project was designed to produce a scholarly community that would provide an intellectual context for research findings. Yet because the community was composed of students, all with similar experiences with nineteenth-century literature, the debates occurred in terms that were meaningful to the students at their particular stage of exposure to literary criticism, rather than in the remoter terms of my discipline.
by Carl Olsen, Scandinavian Students often have trouble understanding why we can't just “take the text as it is." My...response has been to suggest that we consider our mission to be not just the reading of texts, but the exploration of a foreign culture by way of those texts: we are sleuths who have been given a collection of cultural artifacts.
by Monica Gehlawat, English This activity is all about perspective. By creating a new way for the students to look at their writing, I was able to empower them to see how to change it. Tackling the sentences on the board all together with a clear set of drills transformed the debilitating immediacy of one's writing into a liberating problem-solving experience.
by James Ramey, Comparative Literature I was dismayed to find that we had been located in a small, windowless basement room in Haas Pavilion. Claustrophobia heightened my awareness of the need for the students to get along, which led me to wonder how I might structure my course, not only as an intellectual opportunity but also as a social one.
by Nichole Sterling, Scandinavian Ultimately, I have found that creative projects can have place in composition courses. Creative projects can help students to understand what they read, and a greater understanding of what students read can only lead to better papers and better discussion in class.