Teaching

On this page, you can find information and materials related to some courses I have taught at TAMUC, UTRGV, UConn, and KState as well as materials I have developed for UConn’s First-Year Writing program. The page is divided by graduate courses, undergraduate literature courses, education courses, writing courses, and additional materials. For each course, I have included the course description and a link to the syllabus.

A few pedagogical values you will notice throughout these courses:

  • Literature and cultural studies: As a researcher, the study of literature always involves the study of culture, and that connection is important to my courses. I teach my students to read the world through literature, to understand how literature captures and thus impacts culture. I often focus on this by having students look at the mundane or seemingly simple: Disney films and fairy tales, paperback romances and mysteries, pizza and sports. From the quotidian, we discover what our culture values and how those values survive. I hope, through this work, to help students see the importance of the texts they see, read, share, and write every day.
  • Student choice: I always design my courses so that students can apply what we’re doing in class to something that interests them, whether it be their major studies or their favorite thing in the world that they may never get to discuss in an academic setting again. Each course has at least one assignment where they choose their own text outside the course, in consultation with me, so that they can see how our topic impacts other areas of life. During the pandemic, I have also begun to move towards gamified grading where students have more control over what kinds of work they do in my courses so they can choose their own path through our overall course.
  • Creativity: Many students come into English classes assuming that they are creative writing classes. While none of my classes focus on creative writing, I recognize that creative outlets can be an important way to engage in critical work and a way to discuss different forms of literature and rhetoric as well as their purpose and audience. Thus, most of my classes also include some form of creative work, especially projects that ask students to engage in the kind of literature/composition that we are studying in order to analyze how this medium or genre works. For example, in a class on Adaptation and Adaptive Writing, my students not only analyze adaptations but create both creative and analytical video adaptations to experience the process themselves.

I have always found great help and support from other educators in compiling my own teaching materials, so please feel free to use anything on this page that you find useful. I’d love to hear if you do, to hear how it goes, but also feel free to reach out if you would like any more information or materials from any of these courses, especially the assignment sheets.

Graduate Courses

ENG 504: Problems in Adolescent Literature

  • While there is some debate over what counts as the first adolescent novel (a debate we will discuss in class), adolescent literature today has been indelibly influenced by the problem novel genre in which social issues are brought to life and explored through narrative. This course examines the problems common in twenty-first century adolescent literature, including (but not limited to) race, gender, sexuality, class, indigeneity, religion, age, and genre/media. Each week, we will tackle a different problem, examining how specific texts address the problem along with larger questions about why these problems are so prominent in adolescent fiction today.
  • ENG 504 syllabus

ENG 505: History of Children’s Literature

  • In 1960, Philippe Ariѐs published Centuries of Childhood which makes what was then a rather revolutionary claim: childhood is not a stable construct but actually changes over time and across cultures. Since then, children’s literature and media scholars have examined how children’s literature and childhood are mutually constitutive. That will also be our own goal for this course: to understand how children’s literature has shifted over time and what those changes say about the changing nature of childhood.
  • ENG 505 syllabus

ENG 504: Picture Books, Graphic Narrative, and the Art of Images

  • When people think of books with pictures in them, we almost immediately associate them with children. From the simplest board books through picture books and early readers to illustrated and graphic novels, children’s literature is rife with texts that play with the combination of images and words. Because of their association with children, many people belittle graphic narratives, which is insulting to young people, their literature, and graphic narratives, all of which are more beautifully complex than that view allows. In this course, you will learn to understand and analyze these colorful texts in more complex ways, so you can bring these analysis skills into your scholarship, teaching, and wider life. After all, our world is increasingly more pictorial, so this course will help you learn to read the visual world around you.
  • ENG 504 syllabus

ENG 507: Narrative Transformations in Literature for Children & Adolescents: Updating Stories, Audiences, Forms

  • Stories transform; that is their nature. Whether they are oral tales that subtly (or not so subtly) shift every time they are told or part of the contemporary adaptation industry, stories are constantly changing as they move from one person to another. This transformation is especially present in literature and media for young people. In this course, we will explore three forms of transformation: adapting stories for new time periods, adapting stories for new audiences, and adapting stories for new forms of media. With each of these transformations, we will examine how and why creators tell these stories afresh for new generations of children to better understand both the adaptation process and why it is so present in media for young people.
  • ENG 507 syllabus

ENG 508: Reality in Children’s Literature

  • It is said that history is written by the victors, and there is some truth to the saying. At the very least, history and our current reality are constantly being constructed and reconstructed as the media we engage with rewrite it before our very eyes. Currently, nowhere is that battle more intensely fought than for what reality we show our young people. This course explores the constructedness of reality within realistic and historical fiction to ask who is defining that reality, what version of reality are they trying to establish, and why do they want to show that version of reality. In pursuing these questions, we will explore various genres of literature, including some texts that do not seem real at all.
  • ENG 508 syllabus

Literature Courses

CID 2301: The Human Experience: Finding Self and Identity through Dystopia

  • CID 2301: The Human Experience introduces students to humanities-based inquiry by guiding students through an exploration of important humanistic questions across all elements of the human experience. Through the deep focus on a connecting theme, students will engage in holistic discussions of topics addressing fundamental questions about human life and human interactions, develop the skills of humanistic inquiry (including critical thinking, research, literacy skills, and communication skills), and learn to apply their knowledge to their personal, professional, and academic goals.
    • Finding Identity in/through Dystopia: In particular, we’ll consider how dystopias work to dehumanize people and what characters do to push back against that dehumanization. In doing so, you will get a chance to explore your own humanity and ways that it is confirmed or denied by the culture around you. Ultimately, in developing your Transformative Project, you will design your own dystopia and imagine how you can champion your own humanity, both in fiction and in the real world.
    • Reading Identity through Disney: In this course, we will be looking at the concept of identity through media made by The Walt Disney Company. In particular, pairing scholarly texts with Disney films, we will explore how four different identities (gender, sexuality, race, and career) are reflected in, and impacted by, the media we experience every day. In doing so, you will get a chance to explore your own identities and how they are confirmed or denied by the culture around you. Ultimately, in developing your Transformative Project, you will design characters for your own Disney story that depicts various aspects of identity to reflect on how identity is explored and expressed, both in fiction and in the real world.

ENG 406: Adolescent Literature: Rebels with a Cause

  • Teens often get a bad reputation for being punks mad at the world without good reason. However, the last few years have seen young adults leading social movements to make changes in regards to climate change, police brutality, racism, sexism, and gun use. These current movements are based on decades of adolescents taking to the streets to make a good change, and they are often vilified for doing so. That being said, young adult literature is rife with images of young people rebelling for a cause. This semester, we will explore adolescent literature that celebrates teen rebellion and discuss the purpose of such depictions for young people today, especially in the face of so much negative publicity.
  • ENG 406 syllabus

ENG 305: Children’s Literature

  • Children’s Literature
    • How did you come to understand yourself and the world around you? Did someone sit you down and explain the rules of life? Did you learn them by watching others? Did you hear about life from a book or movie? While many people have experienced some combination of these three strategies, stories are one of the major ways that children learn to understand themselves and their world. Whether children are reading books, having books read to them, watching movies or television, engaging with comics, or singing to their favorite music, they are learning. This semester, we will explore how children’s literature gives children the basics for engaging with their world and how their media shapes who they will become.
    • Fall 2024 ENG 305 Syllabus
  • Children’s Visual Culture
    • When people think of books with pictures in them, we almost immediately associate them with children. From the simplest board books through picture books and early readers to illustrated and graphic novels, children’s literature is rife with texts that play with the combination of images and words. In this course, we will examine why texts with pictures are so closely tied to childhood and how we can understand and analyze these colorful texts in more complex ways.
    • ENG 305 Fall 2023 syllabus
  • How Do Stories Shape Us?
    • How did you come to understand yourself and the world around you? Did someone sit you down and explain the rules of life? Did you learn them by watching others? Did you hear about life from a book or movie? While many people have experienced some combination of these three strategies, stories are one of the major ways that children learn to understand themselves and their world. Whether children are reading books, having books read to them, watching movies or television, engaging with comics, or singing to their favorite music, they are learning. This semester, we will explore three ways children’s literature gives children the basics for engaging with their world: how stories teach children to read and interact with stories; how stories teach children to understand cultures around them; and how stories teach children to use their own voices.
    • ENG 305 Fall 2022 syllabus

ENGL 3337: Children’s/Adolescent Literature: Finding Self in Community

  • Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that one of the primary differences between children’s literature and adolescent literature is that children’s literature teaches the child how to fit into their community while adolescent literature teaches teens how to be their own person within that community. In this course, we will examine various kinds of children’s and adolescent literature—including picture books, short stories, novels, graphic novels, and films—to explore just how young people are taught to exist within their communities and cultures, exploring if Trites distinction is accurate. We will focus predominately on how young Latinx and Black protagonists learn to navigate their own identities in American communities that mix various cultures, much like our own Valley. As we explore each type of children’s/adolescent literature, we will explore both how the genre and media have structured children’s/adolescent literature and what these genres/media reveal about how writers, illustrators, publishers, teachers, librarians, scholars, and parents think about young people and their place within the community.
  • ENGL 3337 Syllabus

ENGL 2321: Introduction to British Literature: British Mystery

  • How do you analyze a piece of fiction? The way we most commonly discuss analysis in American universities today involves breaking a text down into its component parts, looking at the smallest pieces to understand what they mean and how they all fit together to create something more. This is also the work of a detective, or at least, the work of the most famous literary detective, Sherlock Holmes. In this course, we will trace the history of British mystery starting with Mr. Holmes and working towards today’s detectives, looking at how the genre developed the clue and learned how to find it in order to better develop our own literary analysis skills.
  • ENGL 2321 Syllabus

ENGL 2341: Introduction to Literature: Guilt in the Literary Imagination

  • While studying various types and genres of literature, this course will pursue one particular course inquiry: what does guilt look like in the literary imagination and, more specifically, how can texts about guilt help us understand our culture? As a culture, we seem fascinated with guilt, as shown by our penchant for detective stories and shows, but guilt can mean many different things: a person can be guilty, can look guilty, can feel guilty, or can (un)fairly have guilt put on them. This course will start with the queen of mystery (Agatha Christie) to grasp how guilt is portrayed through various literary conventions, and then we will explore how various texts build and understand guilt. In doing so, we will examine how texts encourage us to understand the cultural consequences of guilt so that you may better read the world around us.
  • ENGL 2341 syllabus

ENGL 2411: Popular Literature: What’s Popular about Popular Fiction?

  • This course explores what makes popular literature, well, popular, and what value it has for academia and culture alike. The course is divided into five units, with each unit exploring a popular genre through one piece of longer fiction, one piece of shorter fiction, and a film or television show. The first four genres are mystery, fantasy, comics, and romance; the final genre my students chose to be comedy.
  • ENGL 2411 Syllabus

ENGL 1616W–Major Works of English and American Literature: From Major Works to Major Motion Pictures

  • This course explores the concept of “major” in literary studies through four “major” works: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. We discuss how literary canons form so that some texts are considered major and how adaptations either uphold or challenge those designations.
  • ENGL 1616W Syllabus

ENGL 355: Children’s Literature

  • This course covers major genres in children’s literature and is a required course for all primary educators in the state of Kansas.
  • ENGL 355 Syllabus

Education Courses

ENG 300: Reading, Teaching, Analyzing Literature

  • Teaching involves making a lot of choices about what is best for you and your students. In this course, we will explore the many decisions involved in teaching literature to adolescents, including how to design a literature course, how to choose texts, how to integrate state requirements into an engaging classroom, how to develop daily lesson plans, how to assess literary assignments, and so much more. While we will discuss how to read and analyze literature, our main focus will be in how to teach such skills in an engaging way.
  • ENG 300 syllabus

ENGL 4338: Teaching Secondary School Literature

  • Teaching involves making a lot of choices about what is best for you and your students. In this course, we will explore the many decisions involved in teaching literature in secondary schools, including how to design a literature course, how to choose texts, how to integrate state requirements into an engaging classroom, how to develop daily lesson plans, how to grade literary assignments, and so much more. While we will discuss characteristics of literature, our main focus will be in how to teach such literature in an engaging way.
  • I’ve taught this class several times, but this is my favorite version of the syllabus: ENGL 4338 syllabus

Writing Courses

ENGL 1305–Writing Cultural Studies: Reading/Writing Culture through Disney

  • To understand the connections between reading, thinking, and writing in the cultural sphere, this course will focus on reading American culture through the Disney corporation. Disney is perhaps the largest producer and distributor of cultural texts in the world. They have been accused of being conservative and liberal, colonizers and safe spaces of childhood, proactive and reactive, fun and mindless. Most importantly, many critics and supporters alike believe that Disney represents America’s media climate and maybe even America as a whole. In this course, we will focus on how to read our culture through various texts produced and/or distributed by Disney, culminating in a research project of your choosing.
  • ENGL 1305 syllabus

ENGL 1011–Writing through Literature: Fans and Fandom: Writing In/About Participatory Culture

ENGL 1011–Writing through Literature: Adaptation and Adaptive Writing

ENGL 1010–Seminar in Academic Writing: The Rhetoric of Childhood

  • This course explores how written, visual, and oral arguments engage with childhood as a rhetorical tool, deconstructing arguments made around childhood to examine how arguments in general are made.
  • ENGL 1010: Rhetoric of Childhood Syllabus

ENGL 1011–Seminar in Writing through Literature: Little Red Writing Hood: Composition in/through Fairy Tales

Additional Materials

Materials developed for UConn’s First-Year Writing program as they moved towards more multimodal work in the writing classroom:

  • Multimodality, Film, and You: An educational website for students designing multimodal projects to explore how different media will interact with exploration and presentation of film. I originally developed this website at The Ohio State University’s Digital Media and Composition summer institute, which I attended as professional development in order to assist the transition to more multimodal work in UConn’s First Year Writing program. The website looks at how students can discuss film multimodally in traditional academic essays, blog posts, podcasts, video essays, slideshow presentations, and websites, using the medium under discussion to present how the method could work.
  • The Rhetoric of Childhood Syllabus, Round Two: The Rhetoric of Childhood, discussed above, I developed as what our program calls a “baseline syllabus”, or a syllabus that all incoming instructors can use. After teaching the original version for a year, they asked me to update it to include more multimodality. The attached file is what I created, which includes the syllabus, all of the assignments, a schedule, a works cited, and a letter introducing the course to whomever wishes to teach it.