Blogging Pedagogy - lesson plans

The Adapted Lesson Plan

Meredith Coffey — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 20:27:50 +0000

Author:

Meredith Coffey

Image Credit:

Photo by Meredith Coffey, 2009

I love borrowing and tweaking a good lesson plan to meet my own students’ needs. From my first formal teacher training, when I received an enormous binder of lesson plans ready to adapt, to the DWRL’s encouragement to check out its amazing database of lab member-generated plans, I’ve been lucky enough to have regular access to other teachers’ excellent ideas. After years of reworking others’ plans, however, I’ve only recently come to terms with the fact that there is just no set formula or foolproof way to make these adaptations work flawlessly—just like any lesson plan I invent on my own.

Let me give you just two of many possible examples. Last year, I attempted to use Cate Blouke’s plan for using Prezi to introduce the course syllabus. Following her instructions diligently, I reserved plenty of time to prepare a Prezi that reflected my own course’s guidelines. When the big day came, everyone’s introductions ran long, and with limited time to spare—horror of horrors, the Prezi would not play. I tried the link I’d emailed to myself; I tried opening it through my Prezi account; I tried different browsers. Failure.

Of course, this type of technology hiccup can happen under any circumstances, borrowed lesson plan or not, but somehow it had always seemed to me that if someone had done it before successfully, then it should work smoothly in my class, too. A seriously flawed assumption, I know. So, with no Prezi to show for all that preparation, I had to make that move with which every teacher is all too familiar—I had to come up with an entirely different plan on the spot. I promptly directed the students to review the syllabus in small groups and then present key information to the rest of the class. It wasn’t a terribly exciting icebreaker, but at least they had to learn some of each others’ names, read the syllabus closely, and speak just briefly in front of the class. My takeaway from that experience, then, was that even when you think you’re relying on a tried-and-true plan, you still have to remain able to adapt, and keep adapting, as circumstances require.

My second example comes from just a few weeks ago, when I was teaching Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and decided to borrow from Andy Uzendoski’s Lit Genius close reading activity. I followed his guidelines closely: before class, I added five passages from assigned short stories to Lit Genius; I broke them into five small groups, one to annotate each passage; and I had them present their annotations to the class. Overall, this exercise went extremely well. Several of the students were already familiar with Genius (particularly Rap Genius), and something about the digital format made creating annotations seem exciting and novel. Some groups went beyond the exercise’s requirements, adding images to their annotations, for instance. Indeed, it was popular enough that for a later presentation assignment, one group elected to use Lit Genius to share their work.

Once again, though, an unanticipated challenge arose. By and large, the groups spent much longer discussing and annotating their assigned passages than I’d anticipated. The posted lesson plan had warned that the activity could take one to two class periods, but I imagined that if we began right at the start of class, we could manage the complete exercise (one round of annotations, a round of mini-presentations, and another round of annotations of another group’s passage) in one seventy-five minute class period. As will probably not be surprising to readers of this post, this estimation turned out to be overly optimistic. I wound up extending the activity to the next class session, which was not ideal but was certainly doable.

This time around, I couldn’t pin the plan’s failure on a technology problem. Instead, it was an issue of my not having revised the plan sufficiently to meet my timeframe requirements. Even though I knew that the plan could potentially take up to two class sessions, I didn’t sufficiently limit the length of the excerpts, the close reading questions to ask, etc., to make it work for my particular group of students. Sticking closely to script made the exercise an overall success, but further work on my end to hone the plan would have made the execution go even more smoothly.

Of course, the amount of revision necessary to adapt to a lesson plan varies significantly. Sometimes plans turn out to be too short instead of too long (rarely my problem, but it happens!). Indeed, all sorts of challenges can arise while constructing or implementing a lesson plan. All this is to say that I remain a huge fan of adapting others’ lesson plans to work for my own classes—and sometimes sharing my own plans with others—but one of the many skills I continue to develop is that of the adaptation/revision process itself. Process over product, after all.

Graphing Empathy

Scott Garbacz — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 11:20:32 +0000

Author:

Scott Garbacz

Image Credit:

Survey created in Canvas.

This semester, I taught a Banned Books class focusing on the ways that authors deploy empathy. One cornerstone of the class was a series of daily surveys. Each discussion was preceded by a survey (pictured above) in which students gave an informal ranking of their empathetic response to the main character(s) featured in the day’s readings. My goal was to help students theorize their own responses to stories, but I also ended up generating some unexpected revelations.

The surveys about The Satanic Verses went as I expected, but not as my students expected, which provided a valuable learning opportunity. Initially, the novel’s two Indian protagonists were too alien for students to initially identify with them. As a result, student empathy with both characters increased as they found themselves capable of projecting their own identities into Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta. Halfway through the book, however, they were surprised to find their ability to empathize with the characters to be dramatically undercut. My general conclusion is that this dropoff was caused when the details of Rushdie’s novel began to violate students’ expectations of the character. The students own responses, however subjective or imprecise, allowed me to introduce the concept of “false empathy,” where a deep sense of empathic connection actually serves to blind students to the realities of these characters. The temporary drop in students’ empathy, then, might actually reflect better reading practices, as they deconstruct false images of the character and began to grapple with the unfamiliarity of the characters. This in turn lead to better, perhaps less false, empathy. Most students ended up reporting their strongest connections with the characters as they concluded the novel.

The graph for Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, unfortunately, was less enlightening—probably because I chose the wrong character. I had my students rate their connection not with the traumatized Pecola, but with the book’s primary narrator, Claudia. Since her character was not particularly dynamic, students quickly built up empathy for her and stayed quite empathetic. In fact, the only point of interest was a related poll I did on students reactions to the aged child molester who appears later in the book; those results, however, are beyond the scope of this discussion.

Huckleberry Finn generated the most interesting results, managing to truly surprise me. This was true not in the overall graph, but in the details. Generally, Huck followed a similar sine-curve pattern to Gibreel and Saladin, while the less complex (and more passive) escaped slave Jim consistently gained empathy in a linear pattern close to that of Claudia. Yet on the day that students read about Huck’s climactic decision to free Jim even if it meant embracing a life of wickedness, something interesting happened.

Above, you can see a more detailed breakdown of student’s responses before and after they read Chapter 31. Before, most students felt a sense of “moderate emotional connection” with Huck. That is, they felt emotionally tied to Huck Finn’s fate, but they didn’t identify with him on a deep level. After Chapter 31, the class polarized. A narrow majority, as I suspected, responded to Huck’s troubled theological and ethical musings by doubling down on their emotional investment in the character, reporting a newfound “strong emotional character.” But a very significant portion of the classroom found the chapter distancing. They reported being able to “see where he [Huck Finn] was coming from” intellectually, but they lost (at least temporarily) their ability to empathize with Huck.

Charting empathy using an online survey at the beginning of class turned out to be not only a great teaching opportunity, but a great learning opportunity. It certainly didn’t provide rigorous data, and I would be hesitant to make any firm claims based on such an informal series of surveys, but it did provide something valuable: a new way of thinking about how students read, and a series of talking points allowing students to reconsider the nature of their empathic connections with fictional characters.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form of ... Learning?

Duncan Moench — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 12:26:59 +0000

Author:

B. D. Moench

Image Credit:

By Traitrnator

Traditional Art / Drawings / Portraits & Figures

Awhile back I remember reading that, early in his career, Hunter S. Thompson began every morning typing word for word full chapters of The Great Gatsby. At one point in his early twenties, apparently, he’d typed out the whole book multiple times. As with most things Thompson, his friends and colleagues were baffled. When asked “why?” Thompson said “I want to know what it feels like to write something great.”

Now there’s two ways to respond to this: 1) Thompson—who was just as famous for his drug use as he was his pioneering “new” journalism style—was a lunatic and this habit represents just one more quirk to ad to a landfill of quirks or 2) Thompson, who, succeeded in spite (rather than because) of his drug use, had indeed stumbled onto something.

As you’ve probably guessed at this point, I chose the later; and, I decided to test out the thesis on my students. In my 309K course, after their first full paper assignment, many students were struggling with rhetorical analysis. As per usual, many just couldn’t quite get their heads around how analysis is supposed to look. What do you expect? What am I supposed to say? How is analysis different than opinion? What do you mean by “focus on the rhetoric”?

In the past, I’ve found that the best way to answer these questions is to meet with students one-on-one and illustrate, with concrete examples, how their papers are polemical rather than analytical or evaluative rather than substantive. After a bit of instruction most students tend to get the hang of rhetorical analysis and turn out decent work by the middle of the semester. But, with Thompson on my mind, I wondered if there might not be a better, and quicker, way to give students the feel for rhetorical analysis. So, I decided to ask my students to do something — something they, surely, have never been asked to do by a teacher before: copy another person’s work word for word.

I asked my students to take out Lunsford’s Everything’s An Argument (8th ed.), turn to page 108, and read David Brooks’s Times column “It’s Not about You.” After giving them a few minutes to complete the reading, I then asked them to read student Rachel Kolb’s analysis of Brooks’s essay entitled “Understanding Brooks’s Binaries.” Once they finish reading, I ask them to log-in to their nearest computer and open up a Word file and then type the piece word for word. Most students were shocked and I had to repeat myself multiple times.

“Yes, I really want you to copy her essay word-for-word, and, then print it out with your name on the top….give it the title "Imitation Exercise."”

As the class began typing, I surveyed the room and explained that I felt typing Kolb’s words—which are by no means perfect, but certainly competent—would help them not only see, but also feel, how analysis worked on the page.

I started the exercise with about 15 minutes left in the class and most of the students weren’t able to finish in time, so I allowed them to send it to me before the next class session. So far, most of the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Many of my students have commented that the exercise really helped them get a better feel for what was expected in rhetorical analysis. I have to say that their paper revisions were significantly improved across the board, and, in many cases far more than I expected. It’s worth also mentioning, that, thus far, no students have confused the intention of the exercise in any fundamental way. I haven’t received any papers copying whole phrases from Kolb’s work or, even cutting too close to her text, which, really, would be almost useless, since she is of course analyzing a completely different piece of rhetoric. I highly recommend giving an “imitation exercise” a try.

If you already require Everything’s An Argument, Kolb’s paper won’t require any printing; an exemplary work from a past student, or the edited student essays reprinted in the back of the textbook Critical Situations would work just as well. The key is making sure to have the original piece they analyzed to pair with the paper.

If you give it a try (and it works) don’t thank me, thank HST … and, if it fails spectacularly, please also direct the necessary blame his way as well :)

Rhetorical Figure of the Day: Introducing Classical Rhetorical Figures in the Modern Classroom

Deb Streusand — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 18:23:28 +0000

Author:

Deb Streusand

Image Credit:

StaffordGregoire. Original image is here.

As a PhD student new to UT, I came to my teaching at the Department of Rhetoric and Writing with a knowledge of rhetoric derived from my experience at Mary Baldwin College's Shakespeare and Performance program. Professor Ralph Alan Cohen taught MFA students about the classical rhetorical figures Shakespeare would have learned in grammar school. We studied their role in Shakespeare's text and explored how actors can make use of them in performance. I quickly discovered that this type of rhetoric was not on the curriculum for RHE 306, but I thought my students might benefit from some exposure to it all the same.

I decided to turn it into a sort of warm-up, the “rhetorical figure of the day,” before we launched into discussing the rhetoric of modern controversies. (This exercise would come right after my “morning question,” in which I asked the students something about themselves that was also related to RHE 306’s topic of consumer culture, like “what is your favorite possession?” or “what would you do with a million dollars?”)

I told my students upfront that the rhetorical figure of the day wasn’t something they were going to be tested on or that they needed to memorize. I would be teaching them these things because I thought it was important: I believed it would be valuable for them to recognize the use of these tools in a text or, even better, learn how to employ the figures themselves.

From my students’ perspective, this is what the rhetorical figure of the day looks like on the projector:

Anaphora Slide final.png

I uploaded each figure to the class website, so that the students could refer back to it whenever they wanted. At first, I would select one example from a famous speech and one from a literary text, so that the students could get an idea of the different contexts in which these figures appear. I wrote the definitions myself, but also consulted Richard Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms and Gideon O. Burton’s Silva Rhetoricae.

For the first two weeks, “rhetorical figure time” went like this:

-Student 1 reads Example 1

-Instructor reads the definition and explains it

-Student 2 reads Example 2

-Instructor attempts to explain what the rhetorical figure is used for and what it does.

Rhetoric is no exact science, however, and so I use “attempts” advisedly. I found it difficult to explain what I thought the rhetorical figures did and how they accomplished it, so I decided to ask the students what they thought instead. After the second student finished reading the above example from Richard III, I asked, “so, what effect do you think the anaphora has here?” I thought I might be faced with silence, but two students jumped in quickly. “It hammers it into your head when they repeat it like that,” said one. And then, oh joy of joys for my nerdy heart: “this is one of my favorites,” said another, “because you start to expect a kind of peak, when they get to the end of the repetition.”

Having the students discuss the effect of the rhetorical figure worked better, but I still felt I could do more to engage those who weren’t speaking up. Chatting with my fellow instructors, I noted the success they’d had getting students’ attention through the use of videos. I started looking around for videos and music that used rhetorical figures. On American Rhetoric, I found some examples from movies I knew my students would be familiar with:

Lion King Be Prepared 1080p HD

Video of Lion King Be Prepared 1080p HD

“My teeth and ambition are bared. Be prepared!”

--The Lion King's Scar shows off his zeugma (2:56)

Wizard of Oz

Video of Wizard of Oz

“You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe.”

--The Wizard of Oz is also a wizard at isocolon (3:42)

I showed my students clips from these movies in the place of Example 1, and then led a brief discussion as before. What I found was that when playing a bit from a movie, even a short clip, it’s almost impossible to study a single rhetorical figure in isolation. Scar uses three more rhetorical figures in the two lines surrounding the quote above, and the Wizard has a great bit of rhetoric coming up right after the moment I chose. I tried to pause the clip after the part I was interested in, but if I came in even a few seconds late with the pause button, there was already more rhetoric coming our way. I tried to use these accidents to convey to my students how much rhetoric surrounds us all the time.

Meanwhile, my “morning question” exercise was running out of steam, as I struggled to come up with new questions that both had to do with consumer culture and would allow my students to share something about themselves. So, I decided to change up the morning routine by having one student at a time bring in a favorite piece of rhetoric for each day. I started by giving them the St. Crispian’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, reading it to them and telling them what I liked about its rhetoric. I hit a snag with the next class because the student I thought had volunteered wasn’t prepared, but then it turned out that another student had gotten excited and had his all ready to go. He had printed out the “Wear Sunscreen” advice column by Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune for us, and he showed us a YouTube video of the song “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen),” a Baz Luhrmann remix of the column read aloud and the Rozalla song “Everybody’s Free (to Feel Good).” He didn’t use the exact language of the rhetorical figures, but he did talk about the juxtaposition between the serious and the comic in the text, and how the alternation between long, complex phrases and single verbs of advice heightened that contrast. The class discussed the effect of putting the music underneath the words of the text.

As I was arranging my next volunteer, a student who hadn’t spoken much suddenly cut in: “I think you said this in the first class, but…why this rhetoric stuff? I mean, I’m never going to use this, so why?” In a movie, I would have had a perfect, inspiring speech ready to go. In reality, I said something like this: “well, that’s a valid question, and I can see why you would think you wouldn’t use it. But these rhetorical figures really do help to persuade people when you’re making an argument, whether you’re trying to get funding for something that you care about, or asking your boss for a raise, any time you want to persuade someone. The reason the figures have such weird Greek names is because people have been using them to convince other people for more than two thousand years. So you may not see it right now, and as I said, it’s a very valid question, but you may end up using these, and if you do, you’ll have an advantage.” If I were writing the movie script for that moment, I might make my answer a bit less financially focused and a bit more idealistic, but at the same time, I think choosing those practical examples might have actually made an impact on my skeptical student. We’ll see when she brings in her favorite piece of rhetoric!

This coming week’s rhetorical figure media samples will come from hip-hop songs, thanks to my Mary Baldwin colleague Angelina LaBarre’s MLitt thesis, “Entering the Educational Cypher: Hip-Hop and Shakespeare in the Classroom.” Future weeks will feature standup comedy and advertising. I’m having great fun with the process of expanding my library of rhetorical figure examples, because I’m still finding new places where rhetoric is hiding. I can’t wait to see what my students bring in over the next few weeks.

Incentives, Focus, and Games

Cole Wehrle — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 18:47:47 +0000

Author:

Cole Wehrle

Image Credit:

Hatdow

Most teachers who allow laptops in the classroom regret their choice shortly afterwards. Though students are always initially thankful and attentive, soon their eyes begin to wander to the screen. At first they play little games. Maybe they can have both MSWord and Wikipedia open at the same time, but maybe teacher will notice all that clicking and dragging so the reorganization goes unfinished and their browser sits blank, right next to whatever notes they are trying to compose. It’s not long before they start wondering if you will notice them. They begin a regular oscillation between empty looks towards the front of the class and quick glances back to their screens. After a few minutes of this their confidence builds. Slowly, with all the guile of a child stealing a cookie, they type in the f-a-c-e-b—that will launch them into a social-media stupor.

Such events are the grist for the mill of recreational teacher commiseration. The students are both brazen and listless—empty heads, somehow overstuffed with tripe. In talking to my peers, there seem to be only two solutions: either you implement an outright ban or vigilantly maintain surveillance state to shame them from their screens.

Of course, both solutions fail to really solve the problem. At their heart they are only treating the symptoms of a larger disengagement. In order to begin to solve problems of inattention, teachers must first address some uncomfortable questions. Why exactly do students want to fritter away their precious class time on Farmville, facebook, or ESPN.com? What do these resources provide that I, as the teacher, lack? The most common answer usually has something to do with the laziness of students and various cultures of disengagement and irresponsibility (i.e. “kids these days!”). However that line of thinking dismisses the considerable accomplishments of sites like ESPN.com, Facbook, and yes, Farmville.

After a summer of self-exile in the world of high school teaching, the answer to this question became immediately apparent. The vast majority of students in rhetoric and English classes arrive at the University of Texas fresh from their experience in high school. For many of these students, the rigor of a 30 hour high school course load all but precludes open disengagement. That’s not to say high school students don’t waste time, only that their engagement within class is heightened. There is simply more at stake. Thanks to college admissions and brow-beating parents, grades have serious consequences. Accordingly the students are placed into a tight information loop. Unlike the two or three meetings of a weekly college course, in high school their performance is constantly evaluated, and it’s not uncommon, especially in math and science classes, to receive grades daily.

These may be obvious observations, but they create a considerably underappreciated environment. Secondary school courses establish a culture of almost constant evaluation and considerable incentives. In some ways it’s not unlike the world they view on a Facebook news feed. The information is oriented around their position in their social sphere and contains constant feedback for every input. Of course, few would argue that the average status update carries the same importance as an algebra test, and it even seems a little silly to compare the two. Nevertheless, the unity in focus that might be directed towards alegrbra and Facebook reveal and important truth: the size of an incentive doesn’t matter; it’s the presence that commands focus, and it in this respect that the design principals of games demand our attention.

On Fridays, after a week of rigorous test preparation I would often reward my high school students with a day of classroom games. At first, in order to get them in the mood for something childish, I offered a range of incentives: homework passes, quiz boasts, participation points. At first I was elated by the response. A majority of the students seemed to genuinely become interested in the classroom activities. I even watched a student reprimand a fellow student for lollygagging on their cell phone during the competition. However, involvement was not uniform. By-and-large, the most active participants were the students who desired the “prize.” This led me to a new tactic. Instead of designing complicated and seductive prizes, I thought I would dream up more interesting games and keep the “prizes” either within the game or disregard them entirely. For instance, on one occasion I happened to draw each team a mascot on the board. As each team won points I would offer their team’s mascot various props (a top hat, a motorcycle, et cetera) to indicate who had won the round. Though first offered as a joke, the students became highly competitive over the virtual bling and kids who had little interest in the material immediately became engaged. By keeping the prizes within the space of the game, the students could allow themselves to become unplugged and focus just at the task at hand.

In Defense of Winging It

Scott Nelson — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 02:55:09 +0000

Author:

Scott Nelson

Image Credit:

Scott Nelson, 2012, CC BY-SA

So far this semester, my best lesson plan wasn’t planned. In fact, it was purposely left vague and unformed just to see what would evolve. And with digital media, I would argue, these unplanned moments can be where the most instruction can occur.

This semester, I’m teaching Literature & Video Games, a literature course that compares the two media and the narrative experiences they provide. Students have already practiced close reading of both video games and literature, with individual students choosing their own analytical stances. Up until recently, I gave students a fair amount of structure for each assignment, with detailed instructions for completing close readings and analyses. Their latest assignment, however, was a straightforward, yet vague charge: create an eBook.

While writing about video games and pedagogy has seen an explosion over the past ten years or so, the field is relatively sparse when it comes to writing about the connection between literature and video games. I saw this dearth of materials as a prime opportunity to have students create a meaningful resource for others in the field. I also felt it was a great opportunity to explore a relatively new medium. Though eBooks are in many ways similar to webpages, they come with different audience expectations. For one, webpages have an implied responsibility to be updated regularly, while eBooks are more similar to their print cousins: they are updated through editions if ever at all. A resource like an eBook on literature and video games could provide a snapshot of a rapidly evolving discipline.

More importantly, though, this experiment performs a similar function to the artifacts it studies; it asks students to explore and play. Much like a video game, approaching a new medium is full of ludic moments of testing the limits and seeing how they respond. Because eBooks are relatively new, their conventions are not as firmly set as older media. Should they be thought of as more like books, with static content (like I indicate in the previous paragraph)? Should they use more dynamic interface metaphors like those of film and video games? Are they just a convenient way to experience text, or should they provide more interactive experiences?

All of these questions (and more) came out in the unplanned lesson. I merely told students that they would need to create an eBook on literature and video games, and it should be completed by the end of the semester. While some of the more structured lessons this semester have evoked lukewarm responses from students, this lesson had them engaged in a process of creativity and play. Students formed committees for producing the eBook, ranging from page layout to copyediting to copyrights to party planning (of course, they needed refreshments for their studio days). Students researched file types and programs for eBook production, venues for housing their publication, and issues surrounding copyright. Each student will be responsible for a chapter, but all will be responsible for producing a quality product.

We have an excellent resource at the Digital Writing and Research Lab for lesson plans. Innovative assistant instructors experiment with new programs or new approaches to older tools, and because of their efforts, we have amassed an invaluable resource. However, there are some aspects of pedagogy that don’t fit so easily inside a lesson plan. Maybe more significant than plans or lack thereof, teaching seems to require a flexible attitude, a willingness to deviate from the script and react to where the experience takes the class. And digital media, in particular, demands such an approach. Technology seems to delight in derailing the best-laid plans, but it also provides a responsive playground to test emergent hypotheses. The more I teach, the more I see my role as creating an environment where these emergent behaviors can evolve, and getting out of that evolution’s way.

Foucault Vivant

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 16:05:30 +0000

Author:

Pearl Brilmeyer

Image Credit:

Bruce Jackson

Teaching Foucault to undergraduates can be a daunting task. However, I find that an enthusiastic group can handle short portions with ease when appropriately prepared.

As an instructor of sexuality studies, I regularly teach the introduction to Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality. While I've taught this text in the context of a rhetoric course on monogamy, this semester it grounded the historical unity of my course, Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture in the English Department. Notoriously difficult, this introduction is often misread due to the failure of scholars to pick up on Foucault's sarcastic tone, as he narrates the "history of sexuality," traditionally understood. In the past, I've had trouble conveying this tone to my students, who, like many of us have been taught that "theory" is serious stuff. This bias makes it difficult to get Foucault's jokes and miss the point that the "history" Foucault begins with is a kind of "story" we tell ourselves, as the French word "l'histoire" connotes.

I wanted to create a lesson plan that would lighten up class discussion and make transparant Foucault's joking tone. I also wanted to focus our discussion on the construction of historical narratives, and to talk about the relationship of narrative to history. This in-class assignment was designed to help students understand Foucault's theory of the "repressive hypothesis" by physicalizing the "story" he tells in the introduction of The History of Sexuality. Engaging with the humorous aspect of this introduction, students are asked to act out, in the fashion of the tableau vivant, scenes in throughout the parodic history Foucault seeks to overturn. In small groups students used the computers to find music to accompany their assigned paragraph/scene. We then performed them as a class, while I narrated the first few paragraphs of the text.

Image Credit: OldOnliner

In my class, I have a students with a range of familiarity with gender and sexuality theory--some are women's and gender studies majors and others have little experience thinking about gender and sexuality in a theoretical way. In general, the queer theory "pros" in class found the assignment a bit juvenile. Before the exercise, they pouted a bit about having to treat such a serious text in a silly manner and many expressed annoyance at having to perform in front of the class.

Others, particularly those for whom "theory" was a more foreign object, however, completed the assignment in good humor and discovered creative ways to represent various stages in Foucault's parody of the tale of Victorian prudishness from which we need to liberate ourselves. The performance ended with the final group ripping a piece of paper on which they had written "Freud"--a silly, but succinct way of conveying Foucault's call to move beyond the narrative of repression/liberation.

In general, there were a lot of laughs and the assignment helped students visualize the "history of sexuality" Foucault was attempting to counter in the rest of the book.