Claire Carly-Miles has designed multimodal assignments in which student-led small groups choose critical scenes from a text, find or create visuals to accompany each scene, choose music to score these scenes, and then present their group work in class. This assignment encourages students to examine the “family resemblances” between supposedly disparate modes–textual, visual, and aural–and then highlight their similarities and connections. The emphasis on applying the personal (music choices and created visuals) also grows a sense of family in making the personal academic and the academic personal. Further, this assignment empowers student resistance to encroachment on academic freedom. As instructors in Texas find the noose of the law tightening around their curricular and pedagogical necks, empowered students may be able to exercise expression that, more and more, we cannot.
Matt McKinney examines the study of popular culture within the realms of textual and genre analysis where it provides a nuanced and adaptable approach for instructors’ cultivation of student agency and engagement. Specifically, through an examination of “family resemblances” between texts within a genre, between critical lenses that engage in deconstructions of similar texts and overlapping power dynamics within them, resemblances between students’ and instructors’ mutual exchange of knowledge, and the more literal family resemblances within the intertextuality of different generations’ formative media. In his Rhetoric of Popular Culture course, the class explores these family resemblances, culminating in days where students choose texts and lead discussion. Drawing from reflexive pedagogy scholars such as Donald Schön and L Van Beveren, Dr. McKinney will discuss how to scaffold assignments over the semester towards a student-led class.
James Francis, Jr., promotes self-advocacy in students both before and during each semester. Through pre-semester surveys requesting students choose texts and types of assignments for the course, students have a hand in reading and assessment decisions, resulting in their being more invested in engaging with the material and how they perform academically. This early, pre-semester connection between student and instructor is crucial in forming a family resemblance in which class members can rely on each other more through a shared balance of power, control, and authority among all. At the end of the semester, students create multimodal projects, selecting from one of four research projects: a standard research essay on a single text, a comparative analysis essay on two-to-three texts, a video essay on a single text or multiple texts, or a creative writing revision narrative. The presentation of a multimodal-project approach for the final project empowers students with more freedom in the path of assessment within the course, enhances their engagement with the course material and, and creates additional, smaller community units in the classroom for students to work together based on research, writing, and/or invention interests.
Patricia Garcia examines how courses taught by non-tenure-track faculty are often under scrutiny from the university as well as outside entities that review and legislate our curriculum and graduation requirements. Any sort of “back to basics” arguments about education inevitably argue for canonical texts and traditional assessment methods. Yet such approaches ignore the types of conversations that happen in the classroom as we read texts for both their canonical significance as well as their contemporary meaning. She argues that older texts such as Beowulf or The Tempest reflect their historical moment as well as speak to themes that are not only universal but relevant to our current moment. Drawing from reader response and narrative theories that argue the importance of readers utilizing their textual power to read, interpret, and critique texts, her pedagogy and course design allow for student-directed learning. In her Shakespeare course, students create their own monologues by editing together Shakespeare’s words with contemporary speeches of their own choice. In lieu of the traditional essay, students in her honors world literature course write a process narrative of how they read and engage with a text, creating their own narrative of interpretation that asks critical questions about how the text works, what they as readers contribute to the text’s meaning, and what larger questions about the world these questions ask. Through these methods, students practice not only critical thinking but also individualized thinking, working to take apart traditional structural powers in the classroom and in our current political environment.