Rachel Schneider's blog

Field Report: Eighteenth-Century Literature Meets Twenty-First Century Tech

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 11:27:20 +0000

Author:

Rachel Schneider

Image Credit:

The weekend of March 21st, I was able to attend the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. While I always enjoy attending panels on subjects related to my academic research, another delight is seeing how other eighteenth-century scholars talk about teaching. Far from being stodgy or leather-elbow’d, the scholars on the SHARP panel “Wormius in the Land of Tweets: Archival Studies, Textual Editing, and the Wiki-trained Undergraduate” showed off projects and classroom pedagogies for teaching students about scholarly genres and book history practices.

Because SHARP is the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing, many of the academics on the panel discussed what kinds of digital editing projects their students had accomplished. The digital edition is a great place to teach all kinds of scholarly labor: researching textual histories, deciding on a copy-text, making editorial and style decisions, writing footnotes and scholarly introductions, locating and incorporating contextual documents and academic research to provide background, as well as considering how to address and direct their work for a particular kind of audience.

On one hand, Dr. Stephen Gregg of Bath Spa University showed off online scholarly editions of Defoe’s The True-Born Englishman and A Hymn to the Pillory that his students created. What’s nice to see is that Gregg’s students themselves considered questions of accessibility: how can more people access high-quality editions? What kinds of audiences should the text and notes be prepared for? His students chose online delivery systems for their texts and even considered how the coding itself is a separate kind of text. They considered how to remix the eighteenth-century page online: one student opted to preserve the catch-words while the other used hyperlinks for the notation system. Each text includes a critical apparatus to explain its methodology as well.

On the other hand, Dr. Emily Friedman of Auburn University had her students create a proposal for a new critical edition of a text. They examined first editions of various period texts and discussed and examined critical editions like Broadview’s edition of Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers to think about what an edition could include. Her students then produced PDFs with sample statements of editorial style, critical introductions, and contemporary textual elements like book reviews. They also designed cover illustrations for their editions and wrote reflection pieces on how the cover represented the book. Her Prezi shows not only pictures of the completed projects but also the students from the class who successfully won a research award for their work.

Interactions with physical books weren’t limited to research archives. Dr. Evan Davis of Hampden-Sydney College discussed how he taught students book history by asking them to take blog posts they had written for the class, revise them, then actually produce a physical book of them. As his course covered Gutenberg to Google, he forced students to embody a variety of experiences from book history, whether reading a book in different formats (iPad, Kindle, and book) or in different situations (by candlelight). What interested me in this was not only the consideration for how format and design affect the reading experience but also how students played around with the low/high tech concerns: one student printed his book with QR codes inside, so the reader could move from physical object to mobile browsing.

Finally, Wayne State University’s Dr. Lisa Maruca teaches the eighteenth century through media events like the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or the début of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. Maruca then connected her concerns with public events with the students’ own public personas, encouraging them to choose a blogging platform like WordPress or Tumblr and develop their professional identity on the blog. Maruca got even the digitally resistant students thus to consider questions about design, intellectual property, and publicity through their own created persona, linking the past with the present.

As an eighteenth-century scholar myself who is likewise interested in increasing my students’ digital literacies alongside my own, joining the historical study of communication technology with how to conduct it in the present, such work is deeply inspiring. If you’d like to learn more about the kinds of ideas exchanged at the conference, feel free to delve into the Twitter archive created by Ben Pauley.

What to Do When Students Want to Talk in Class

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 01:02:47 +0000

Author:

Rachel Schneider

Image Credit:

Marc St. Gill

I’ve been feeling very invigorated this semester as a teacher for several reasons: I’m teaching RHE 309S for the first time, incorporating more digital writing and texts into my syllabus, and the kids I’m teaching seem pretty invested in the material. In fact, they love to talk in class. Managing the class discussions, then, has presented a new challenge for me as a teacher.

Like my colleague Steven, I’m much more familiar with the problem of getting reluctant students to participate in discussion. As such, I’ve figured out how to use my particular exuberant energy to crack jokes, to present the material in a non-threatening manner, to encourage students to feel comfortable participating (and how to learn everyone’s name so you can call on them in to spread the talking around). Teaching my RHE 309S for the Liberal Arts Honors program has significantly changed the dynamic, however. Whereas in most classes you’re lucky to have about two students who talk on a regular basis, right now about ten of my twenty-one students participate in every class, and about fifteen raise their hands at least once a week. It’s the stragglers who are more noticeable at this point than the talkers.

While this might seem like an embarrassment of riches or a straight #humblebrag, I’ve had some surprisingly challenging moments: for example, at one point during a discussion of stasis theory not only was I fielding some pretty challenging questions, I had two students arguing during a stasis analysis of the same-sex marriage debate about whether or not law should be determined by religious morality. The conversation got so tense that I had to raise my voice and shout “HEY!” to end the debate, and one of the other students approached me after the class to talk about how uncomfortable the tension made her feel. This kind of rough-and-ready exchange provides both some nice intellectual charge and an uncomfortable dynamic: how do you monitor classroom discussion when everybody wants to have a say? Does that mean that you have to let everyone talk equally? How do you encourage silent students to participate when others are eager to speak, or is that even advisable? What is the balance between leading the discussion and letting the discussion be student-centered? And how far do you try to balance the contributors?

The nice thing about this situation was that it led me to consult with experienced instructors to hear their reflections and advice. One professor recommended turning this argument into a teachable moment that could connect back to the previous lesson—what makes rhetoric and stasis so important is how it provides the means to have productive debate on important issues. Another suggested I connect the situation to a discussion about where rhetoric takes place: it rarely happens in polite, controlled circumstances and people don’t always adhere to the rules. Others recommended that I talk about appropriate classroom behavior or even gamify it. I was even told that to handle honors students, I should alternate between catering to their sense of themselves “special snowflakes” and attempting to “melt” it. I loved that each response helped attend to a different aspect of the problem: accommodating the egos in play, creating the rules of interaction for classroom discussion, and connecting the rhetorical material to the ways in which discuss rhetoric.

Since then, I’ve adopted several different strategies to help lead successful discussion among students. I ended up following the advice about addressing it as a teachable moment, and tried to make my questions explicit to the students in order to invite them to help provide the answers. I’ve also since tried to intervene to frame the goals for discussion and to keep them on topic by asking them to cite examples from the text. To organize the conversations, I occasionally clarify what I see emerging from the discussion as a way to help redirect at various points. Like Steven, I’ve tried to provide opportunities for students to do short writing exercises at the beginning of class to allow the other students to come up with contributions, deliberately framing them in this way, as well as just calling on students occasionally when a rare silent moment presents itself. I’m cautious in some ways too in how gender dynamics are playing out—it seems like while of these ten most talkative students seven of them are women, the three male students tend to talk back and forth to each other for extended periods. I try to recognize and affirm positive contributions and try to intervene more directly to keep the conversations related to the day’s topic. While I hope I show my students that I value their interests and directions, I also try to find ways to encourage a variety of students to respond to make the conversations not only more lively but also more inclusive. I can only hope that my students will help teach me how to make the class discussion productive for them all.

Incorporating Pop Culture Texts in the Classroom

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 23:35:03 +0000

Author:

Rachel Schneider

Image Credit:

DestinysChildVEVO

In order to improve my course design and teaching, I ask my students at each semester’s end for feedback on the assignments and course texts. When I reviewed their responses for last semester’s class, in which I taught an E314L class on Women’s Popular Genres, one text emerged as a favorite: the Destiny’s Child song “Independent Women Part I.” I used the music video during the first and second class days to introduce students to formal, historical, and cultural reading practices. It did not surprise me to see them bring this up, as popular culture provides unique material for both rhetorical and literary analysis. The various advantages and disadvantages of the material, however, I intend here to further explain.

In this specific case, I agree with my students. Teaching “Independent Women Part I” helped me disrupt students’ expectations and invited them not only to view close reading but the song itself through new eyes. I showed them the video first with lyrics, inviting them to takes notes on anything they noticed in particular: the melodies, the lyrics, the costumes, the dancing, the sets, etc. After an initial viewing, during which they also had the lyrics before them on paper, I asked them to talk about what they had observed.

The conversation that followed was wide-ranging: they not only closely read the material but also put it into larger musical and political contexts. They considered how the song’s lyrics and visuals responded to second- and third-wave feminism as well as the specific cultural experiences of African-American feminists. We analyzed how the auditory and visual elements modeled or engaged with these different “feminisms.” The students read the costumes and the performance in light of both the Charlie’s Angels movie the video promoted and the original 1970s television series. We also considered how the song’s rhyme schemes, verses, and bridge build and draw attention to various phrasings, and how lyrics like

“Question: how’d you like this knowledge that I brought
Braggin’ on that cash that he gave you is to front
If you’re gonna brag make sure it’s your money you flaunt
Depend on no one else to give you what you want”

developed tone and invited readerly engagement with the text. While the song was familiar and fun, it was also not so recent that they didn’t struggle to reconstruct some of the cultural context (particularly the late-90s/early-00s “girl power” movement). And while we did not have time to read discussions of Beyoncé’s lyrics from pop feminism blog Jezebel, I gestured to it as an example of the connections between art and larger cultural questions.

This may have been so successful in part because, as I’ve previously described on viz, I’ve taught pop culture texts many times before. I’ve planned three classes—one on the Rhetoric of the Musical and two different versions of Women’s Popular Genres—that have all involved popular culture genres: musicals, novels, songs, or television shows. Through these experiences, I’ve learned about the unique challenges that such texts create. For example, teaching my students about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and other musicals in my Rhetoric of the Musical class allowed us to explore the question of how popular culture has commented on and presents arguments about America and “American values” since the genre’s origins in the 1920s. We were able to read and discuss Bruce Kirle’s analysis of Oklahoma!, which argues that the show attempted to persuade people against isolationist policies during World War II. However, the students struggled with accepting the arguments—they had difficulty seeing how something “silly” or “fun” like musicals could have any sort of cultural implications or intent. When teaching them Stacy Wolf’s essay on Wicked, they were even hostile to the arguments. Their own lack of expertise in music also often left them struggling to articulate their analysis of the material: in other words, while they could characterize the melody as “sad,” they couldn’t generally articulate why. Also, while teaching women’s popular genres meant it was easy to allow the students to write their final research papers on any subject they chose, it also meant they were inclined to work on texts that had not yet been included in critical conversations, like the television show The Vampire Diaries or Katy Perry’s music.

Like I tell my students about writing, teaching pop culture texts is a choice with both advantages and disadvantages. Students are easily interested in them, but sometimes lack critical vocabularies to explore them. Their utility also depends on the assignments for which they’re included. In short, I will always enjoy using Glee to teach kairos, but will be sure to provide them appropriate vocabulary to explore how the text performs kairotically.