In “Adaptation, Interdisciplinarity, Collaboration, and Professional Development” Lissette Lopez Szwydky highlights the ways that developing and running a professional development Institute for school teachers has both transformed and invigorated teaching and research among the group. Using adaptation studies and her training as a literary and cultural historian, Szwydky’s pedagogical goals focus on helping students build bridges among subjects as a form of critical literacy that extends well beyond the classroom. By working on a summer institute for K-12 educators, Szwydky has been able to develop new interactive, multimodal assignments for the college courses she teaches that helps students make clearer connections between their liberal arts training, public engagement, and professional possibilities. From its early conceptual stage, to execution, to ongoing programming, these collaborations have impacted the courses that Szwydky teaches, while also feeding directly into research expected at an R1 institution through presentations at conferences, to co-authored book chapters, and three co-written or co-edited books in progress. The goal of this presentation is to provide a framework for thinking about how interdisciplinary, collaborative projects can help faculty at different stages of their career rethink and reinvigorate their research and publications as well as update their teaching methods by adapting their work to public-facing projects.
Sean Connors will focus on the value of “Incorporating Digital Composing Projects in K-16 English Classes.” The proliferation of digital technologies in the twenty-first century has made it easier than ever before for the average person to produce multimodal texts—texts which integrate two or more modes—in the service of making meaning. The ramifications of this shift are profound for English educators at all levels: today, supporting students’ development as critical producers and critical consumers of texts necessitates teachers’ creating opportunities for them to experiment with the diverse array of mediums available to them. Adaptation provides a way to extend these opportunities beyond Language Arts classrooms and offers a bridge to art, music, theater, computer, and media classes through interdisciplinary and integrated approaches to the study of language and storytelling.
Grounding his presentation in research on multimodality and multiliteracies, Connors will offer a rationale for incorporating digital composing assignments in college and K-16 English classes. Drawing on his experiences collaborating with Szwydky to facilitate an NEH Summer Institute for Teachers, he will discuss the benefits of college faculty building collaborative partnerships with school teachers. He will share a series of projects that he has undertaken with teachers and students at both the college and secondary level, all of which have involved their adapting literary texts in the service of creating digital films, podcasts, comics, and stop-animation videos. To conclude, Connors will offer practical suggestions for college educators interested in partnering with K-12 educators and including multimodal, digital composing projects in the curriculum.
In “Adaptation: Storytelling, Technology, and What It Means to Be Human,” Glenn Jellenik will discuss the ins and outs of adapting research and teaching to provide quality professional development to college students preparing to be teachers as well as in-service teachers. Jellenik’s teaching focuses on developing a vocabulary to critically engage the intersections of literature, film, and other forms of popular culture. The ethos of his “Film and Literature” course begins with two Salman Rushdie codas: “Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was,” and “In the end, storytelling is storytelling. Every time you tell a story, you have to struggle with form and the question of how to tell it.” The class functions as a hybrid film/literary studies course on narrative, paying particular attention to introducing the specific vocabulary and stocking the critical toolbox of film studies. Further, the class is heavily invested in critically unwinding unproductive clichés about adaptation (specifically, the cry of “the book was better!” that dominates many academic conversations). These conversations can provide productive models not only in college courses focused on literature and film, but especially in K-12 education where students need to develop engaged models of critically assessing and engaging with storytelling in narrative across forms and media.
Just as we ask our students to find connections through storytelling across forms and media, we should also find ways to work collaboratively to engage in continuous professional development, becoming better teachers, researchers, and humans along the way. As a whole, the panelists will discuss essential questions for humanities and education in the 21st century such as: How do the skills students learn in our classrooms extend across other disciplines and beyond the university and into their professional lives? And how does the cultural literacy developed in adaptation studies allow students to better understand themselves and their world? The projects discussed by the three participants bring together research, teaching, and service, and they provide an opportunity to explore ways that faculty can create more cohesion between these three areas of scholarly work through collaboration while also cultivating productive, interdisciplinary pipelines among humanities disciplines, education departments, and broader communities outside of the University.