Subject-Area Knowledge This unit takes students through a postcolonial and class reading of the rhetoric that the World Council in Ayn Rand’s Anthem uses to impact ideologies and hierarchize society. Then, it asks students to apply knowledge of how rhetoric is weaponized to oppress people to question how the popular rhetoric of the United States …
Facilitate student exploration of how an object’s concrete features (qualities students can experience with their five senses) represent abstract ideas. As symbols are culturally specific, this activity allows students to practice the thinking skills involved in symbolic analysis without assuming students have specific forms of cultural knowledge or positioning one culture’s symbols as more “correct” …
I created a playlist inspired by the stories in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio for a Technology for Teaching and Learning Class. I was surprised at how much time I spent interacting with my peers’ playlists, discovering new music and reading their justifications for why a song connected with the text.
I created a podcast review of the memoir Brave Girl Eating: A Family’s Struggle with Anorexia by Harriet Brown as part of an assignment for my Technology for Teaching and Learning Class.
This children’s book project allows students to explore the themes and motifs of a text through different lenses and then practice summarizing them into a simple story. I have found that the act of creating a non-academic piece of writing inspired by a novel challenges me to form an opinion about what the text is doing and how. I plan to use children’s book projects in the classroom as a way to introduce students to argument forming and help them brainstorm before thesis writing.
As Toshalis (2015) notes, summative assessments should be “positive opportunities to show what students know rather than stress-inducing exercises the catch their mistakes” (p. 103). For instance, students can create fake social media pages for characters to show the teacher they understand the novel’s plot, characters, and tone.
I created this lesson plan with the assistance of a colleague, Olivia Williams, as a project for a Technology in Teaching and Learning class. The objective of the project was to demonstrate our abilities to purposefully integrate technology into our lesson plans to add value to our instruction, class assessments, and students’ learning.
Historical contextualization: “the ability to situate phenomena and the actions of people in the context of time, historical location, long-term developments or particular events to give meaning to these phenomena and actions” (Huijgen et al., 2018, p.1).