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, a few notes on the work we did in that class, 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 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.
  • This was my first online graduate course. The students seemed to like it, but it was a lot of reading/grading on my part as I had students completing discussion boards instead of meeting weekly. Most of my students also mentioned that they feel like they were just getting started learning about graphic narratives, but that’s the problem with short summer courses.
  • 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.
  • This course combined my two major fields: children’s literature and adaptation. It was a lot of fun, and the structure of the course worked really well overall. There were some struggles with amount of readings; I was working on balancing reading source texts and adaptations. That balance still needs a bit more work.
  • ENG 507 syllabus

ENG 508: Constructing Reality and Reconstructing History in Children’s and Adolescent Literature–Whose Reality Is This Anyway?

  • 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.
  • This is my first graduate course, so take it as you will. Using gamified grading and pedagogy I developed in First-Year-Writing courses, I designed this course to give the graduate students as much space to explore their own inquiries within wider course inquiries. The goal was to teach students how to engage in an advanced academic community by modeling that behavior myself.
  • 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.
    • This course is the foundational course for the Humanities Certificate program, a grant-funded, TAMU System-wide initiative designed to create an intentional connective pathway through the core curriculum to infuse the humanities and humanities-based inquiry (critical thinking, research, communication, ethics, morality, cultural awareness, empathy, etc.) into student degree pathways and encourage students to see the relationships between larger questions of the human experience and their own lives and goals. The course is based on Transformative Texts and a Transformative Project. In this course, we will be looking at the human experience through the lens of dystopias.
    • 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.
  • This course is a new course developed for the A&M University System to introduce freshman to humanities exploration. The course is designed to teach students life and student skills along with help them see how they can better analyze their world.
  • CID 2301 syllabus

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.
  • This course went really well, overall. I did have a student who struggled with the representation of religion in two of the texts (Cemetery Boys and Legendborn). If teaching in particularly religious areas, keep that in mind.
  • ENG 406 syllabus

ENG 305: Children’s Literature

  • 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.
      • Every time I teach children’s literature, I try to shake things up. I always focus on teaching students how to read various forms (including picture books, graphic novels, novels, and films), but each iteration has a slightly different focus. This time, I focused on the intended purpose of children’s literature (education/entertainment) versus the effect (how do children experience fiction made for them?).
      • 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.
  • This course was designed specifically for English Education majors, but they only comprised about a half of my class, meaning I worked to include many different kinds of work alongside pedagogical. This class also posed an interesting challenge in that I was supposed to cover both children’s and adolescent literature. That’s a very wide field, so I decided to focus on one aspect where you can compare/contrast the two: the concept of community and how young people fit into that. Since this class was offered at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (UTRGV), I also made sure to include mostly Latinx literature, especially since half of the class would go on to teach their own classes. It was a fantastic experience, especially since many of my students had never seen themselves in their literature and understood the value of passing this literature on to the next generation.
  • 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.
  • This was a dual-enrollment course taught at St. Joseph’s Academy. I had the exact same students as I did in ENGL 2341, and, knowing that I would have the same students, I decided to let them choose the theme. They chose British mystery, which ended up being fairly engaging, especially as a I developed an analogy between our British detectives and the analysis work they needed to do for their essays. I provided a better support system than I did the first semester, and that seemed to really help these high-schoolers.
  • 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.
  • This course was a dual enrollment course taught at a local independent secondary school, St. Joseph’s Academy. I taught high-school seniors, finding a middle place between the college courses I generally teach and the classes they normally took. This is a class that required considerable tweaking throughout the semester as I and my students got used to each other. You’ll see how the cultural studies concept comes through as we studied the cultural concept of guilt through literary study.
  • 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.
  • Since this course focused on the popular, a lot of work we did in class focused on what the students were interested in and thus led to some really fascinating work. For example, I had planned to focus on the development of clues for our mystery unit, but my students were more interested in how guilt was constructed and which bodies were seen as more or less guilty. This conversation became the theme for the unit and affected our conversations about every other genres as well. For their major writing assignment, my students chose a piece of popular fiction and had to make an argument about what made it popular and how that text could help us see the importance of popular fiction to academia/society. From issues of accessibility in Hamilton to the use and abuse of religion in Good Omens, my students developed complex arguments about culture through these popular texts.
  • 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.
  • This course was listed as a secondary writing course, so my students engaged the concept of “major” as much in the classroom as they did outside it. My students completed five components: an essay in which they chose a major work and explained what made it major, an essay in which they compared their “major” work to something we read in class, a creative project in relation to their major work, and a presentation and portfolio wherein they revised their work and presented their highlights to their peers. I pushed my students to think beyond the normal constraints of what counts as major and ended up with some really amazing projects on everything from texts more traditionally considered canonical, such as Jane Eyre and Of Mice and Men, to popular works that have changed conversations around representation, such as The Handmaid’s Tale and HBO’s Euphoria.
  • 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.
  • This course was developed in consultation with Anne Phillips, and much of the way I think about literature syllabi comes from it. Specifically, this syllabus organizes children’s literature into genres, thinking about how certain genres (i.e., picture books and easy readers) are designed most often for children and how other genres that appear across audiences (such as mystery or historical fiction) are adapted for children. This is also where I first got the idea to include creative projects in a syllabus. I borrowed a writing project from Anne in which students created a picture book page based on Molly Bang’s theories, a group project from Joe Sutliff Sanders in which students worked together to make an easy reader, and a final creative project from Karin Westman in which students critically responded to a text through the creation of a creative project (such as a newspaper within the world of the story). As this list makes clear, this syllabus, more than any on this page, was a collaborative venture as I borrowed work from many of my amazing professors, one of the reasons I am so free to share my own work with others.
  • 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.
  • This course is very similar to ENGL 4338 that I taught at UT RGV. That being said, this course was in-person and only met one night a week, so I spent a lot of time in class having students practicing the skills we discussed. Students responded really well to it.
  • 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.
  • This course is one of the truest expressions of gamification I have yet to teach. Throughout the course, students had the opportunity to choose from five types of teaching materials that they could practice creating for their own future classes, along with various other types of writing. My goal here was to give students a space to practice doing the kind of writing teachers do most, but allowing them to focus on the areas of teaching they are most concerned about or most wanted to work on.
  • 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.
  • In this course, we spent the first half of the semester exploring how to read culture through various kinds of texts, including picture books, films, television, shorts, things, and spaces. Then, in the second half, we turned to the practice of writing, with students practicing writing about their own understanding of how Disney interacts with culture in both a traditional academic essay and a multimodal project.
  • ENGL 1305 syllabus

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

  • This course focused mostly on online communities by examining how people express themselves through what they are passionate about.
  • This course was interrupted by COVID, and so had to change as we went. The online nature of our study was fortuitous because students could continue their research wherever they ended up. Students worked on one project throughout the semester, building pieces into a larger whole as they curated an archive, analyzed that archive, and put that archive into conversation with other fan archives. Students struggled at first to understand what they could study, but, because we had a very expansive definition of fandom, I ended with some very interesting projects on everything from sports and media fandom to the fandom around corgis and German Shepherds.
  • ENGL 1011: Fans and Fandom Syllabus

ENGL 1011–Writing through Literature: Adaptation and Adaptive Writing

  • This course explores what adaptations are, how they work across media, cultures, eras, and audiences, and how this process relates to writing.
  • This course may be the one I designed that combined all the elements I am interested in most effectively. The course was about adaptation, focusing on how students can move ideas from one medium to another as they study filmmakers who do the same. The semester was split in two: 1) a collaborative project in which the students made an analytical website and a fairy tale adaptation; 2) an individual project in which they studied an adaptation of their choice and wrote an academic paper then adapted it into a video essay. The collaborative project quickly bonded my students together. Moreover, requiring students to move between different media allowed them to study how rhetoric changes between media and to practice making such changes. They learned a good deal about writing processes while also investigating cultural changes around adaptation.
  • ENGL 1011: Adaptation and Adaptive Writing Syllabus

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.
  • This course produced some very interesting reactions from my students. Many of my students, newly entering adulthood as college freshman, were resistant, at first, to discuss childhood, dismissing it as kid’s stuff that they were too mature for. That pretty much ended the moment we started talking about favorite childhood toys, and they started gushing about things they hadn’t thought about in years. This class also revealed more cultural differences than any class I have ever taught (including a course on language and culture). Students first worked on critically examining how their own childhoods were constructed then compared them to each other to see cultural differences (even between different sections of the country and especially between race and class). They then explored how children are constructed in both fictional media and in conversations around children. Their research project asked them to find their own conversation about children and make an argument for how it depicted children. Students focused on everything from children’s films to dietary instructions and designer babies.
  • ENGL 1010: Rhetoric of Childhood Syllabus

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

  • This course explored writing through fairy tales, both imagining the writing process as a fairy tale in itself and examining a wide range of fairy tales.
  • This was my very first syllabus to write completely on my own, and it shows . I actually really love this syllabus, and it set up many of the practices that I still hold today, including using creativity in the writing classroom and projects that build on each other. The main idea in this course was that students would work on one 30-page project throughout the course, writing and revising chunks of it as we went along. They had dates when they were supposed to turn in certain elements, but they were flexible because I was trying to design a stress-free course. Self-motivated, diligent students produced the best writing I have ever seen in one of my courses. Students who just need deadlines ended up writing most of the project in the week before it was due and so did not produce the best results. This was not my students’ failing, and I learned that some students find concrete deadlines less stressful than leaving everything up to them. I shortened the assignment, made it more collaborative, made deadlines firmer, and it became the first half of my Adaptation and Adaptive Writing course, which worked wonders.
  • ENGL 1011: Little Red Writing Hood Syllabus

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.