I consider teaching to be both science and art, and I see informed, creative, liberal arts teaching as the critical ingredient in fostering the essential learning all college graduates need.
My undergraduate teaching has focused on three areas:
Writing, including rhetoric, composition, and argumentation courses for both freshman (introductory writing) as well as seniors (in a capstone argumentation course).
Literature, including:
– survey and period courses such as the American literature survey (beginnings to present or beginnings to 1900), the American Renaissance, American women writers, and early popular literatures;
– topics in literary study, such as religious print culture, race and literary authority in colonial and nineteenth century America, women and print culture, colonial and nineteenth-century pop literature, and contemporary spiritual memoirs.
General / liberal education, including:
– first-year seminars
– a team-taught, interdisciplinary freshman studies course on “religion, self, and society”
– required writing courses
– required literature courses
– and a required general education capstone course.
Literature, Writing, and General Education Courses
- First-Year Seminar — Getting Schooled: The Promise and Problems of College in America
- The Literatures of American Religious Experience
- Introduction to the Liberal Arts — Religion, Self, & Society: Texts & Contexts, co-taught with Religious Studies professor Kelley Coblentz Bautch
- Capstone – senior-level general education course in research, argumentation, and writing.
- Masterworks of Literature: American (beginnings to present day)
- American Literature to 1900
- First-Year Writing— Equal Opportunities?: Education in America
- First-Year Writing—‘Marlon Brando, Pocahontas, and Me’: American Myths in Popular Culture
- “Scribbling Women”: American Women Writers to 1850
- The “American Renaissance,” Surveyed and Revised
- Bandits and Monster Babies, Captives and Heroes: Reading the Pop Literatures of Early America
- Master of Liberal Arts Thematic Studies 6399: Spirituality and the Self: The Power of Spiritual Print in America
Higher Education / Teaching & Learning Courses & Groups
Teaching also describes much of the work I do with college faculty. Some of that teaching takes the shape of learning communities and institutes.
Innovation Institute – co-designed with Rebecca Frost Davis
Innovation Fellows conduct a pedagogical experiment and help develop a culture of pedagogical innovation at St. Edward’s University. To prepare them for these activities, all fellows are required to participate in a two-week Innovation Institute.
Teaching for 21st-century Literacies – Spring 2014
This faculty seminar focused on “twenty-first-century literacies.” For each emerging literacy, we read pieces about both why and how faculty are teaching areas of essential learning our students need for a changing world.
Teaching, Technology, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age – Spring 2013
This faculty seminar focused on emerging issues and pedagogies in liberal arts education in the U.S.
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Circle – Fall 2014 – Spring 2015
This faculty seminar / workshop focuses on helping busy faculty members learn more about the scholarship of teaching and learning and begin working on their own projects.