Teaching Portfolio
Future Teaching Projects
Distance Learning and English
The summer of 2000 saw the fruition of a collaborative teaching project that a colleague and I undertook to teach ENC 1102. Our classes met in our computer classroom and focused the entire course around a single text: Toni Morrison’s Jazz. This approach will allowed students to achieve and develop firm understandings of this text and allowed a further investigation of the Jazz Age of American culture. Students worked in groups and individually on research and writing in an effort to develop a communal understand and approach to this challenging novel.
This course also incorporated components of distance learning involving a Web-based pedagogical application: WebCT. By using simple applications in this environment, we (teacher and students) built a database of apropos links, used interchange sessions to further develop ideas and work out problems, and offered more variety for different types of learners. This course was one of the first of its kinds offered by the USF English Department.
Since the completion of this collaborative teaching project, I continue to incorporate distance education elements into my classroom. I have moved away from proprietary software, like WebCT, and have instead adopted open-source components, like the excellent enCore database for an educational MOO. I continue to use the Web as an excellent tool for the dessimination of course information, and I will continue to develop other ways of working this resource into my teaching, like the use of forms and other interactive elements.
Teaching Interests / Course Development
As evidenced above, I attempt to develop courses that address “traditional” subject matter in “untraditional” ways. Up until this point, the department’s computer classroom has been used primarily for the teaching of composition, but I keep trying to get literature classes offered in 202. Beginning in the Fall of 1998 I have been able to teach many sections of literature as a computer-assisted courses, and I hope to have more literature courses in 202 in the future. I have diverse literary interests, ranging from epic literature to cyberpunk, Greek philosophy to postmodernism, Shakespeare to Tolstoy. I would enjoy teaching a nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian Literature survey; a speculative fiction course involving literature and film; a cyberpunk, hypertext, and the future of narrative literature and theory course; Modernism and Postmodernism Literature / Theory; and Pedagogy and Technology.
I have developed several courses that have been taught as thematic contemporary literature classes, including the most recent Images of the Body in Contemporary Literature. I’d like to develop a cultural studies course that focuses on a different aspect of technological developments and their effects on human growth and development. This course could address many issues, including transhumanism, evolution, religion, nanotechnology, microprocessing, and biotechnology, among others.
Administration
I have political ambitions as well, but only as they relate to teaching. As I advocate the correct and critical use of technology to assist in teaching, I have co-written grants to construct and maintain computer classrooms and distance-learning curriculums that do not lose sight of those who will be using them, both teachers and students. As I mentioned elsewhere, many faculty members in English Studies resist technology and its use in the classroom; they also question the productivity of scholars who endeavor to use technology for teaching, research, and as a topic for study and often do not look favorably on technology in decisions involving tenure and promotion. These topics must be engaged, and teachers and students who engage them should not be at a disadvantage.