Learning to Turn Data into Stories That Create Change
Data: More than a Four-Letter Word The week after every academic semester brings something many faculty dread: the anonymous student evaluations of the courses they just finished teaching. After nearly two decades of teaching in higher education, I try to read these evaluations with this mindset: just as my critical feedback on students’ writing presents […]
Debunking the Barista Myth: Career Possibilities for English Majors
As a discipline, English experienced its halcyon days in the 1970s when it commanded roughly 7.6% of college majors nationwide. Humanities majors overall comprised 30% of the national student body. As a college student in the 1980s, no one, it seemed, even considered the idea that English could be anything less than a thriving, vibrant […]
Spotlight: What I’m Teaching: Nimona
Recently, in my Graphic Novels class (ENGL 3715), I taught Nimona, a young adult (YA) graphic novel about a young shapeshifter who joins supervillain Ballister Blackheart as his sidekick against Sir Goldenloin and the Institute. When I teach literature classes, I sometimes include a YA book for a few reasons. I often have future teachers […]
What do collapsing bridges, Georges Seurat, and transorbital lobotomies have in common?
A glimpse at three themed first-year writing courses at YSU Collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, November 1940. Photo at the Library of Congress. Introduction What do collapsing bridges, Georges Seurat, and transorbital lobotomies have in common? All of them have come up in the first-year writing courses I’ve been teaching. When you build a bridge, you must account for how it responds […]
What Scares You? New ‘Monsters, Mayhem, and Murder’ Literature Course
Monsters in the literary imagination– and in culture at large– are both born and made, and my upper-division English class explores how we make, and make meaning from, the monstrous, the villainous, and the alien. “Monsters, Mayhem and Murder is the theme for English 3771, British Literature in Historical Perspectives, and we’re reading English Renaissance […]
Coming Home to YSU: A new chapter for the YSU English Major
When I first arrived on the campus of Youngstown State University as an undergraduate English major in the mid-1990s, I could not have imagined that this place would one day become not only my alma mater, but my professional home. I earned my BA here in 1998 and my MA in 2003, both in English, […]