Options for Teaching
There are 56 products in Options for Teaching
Teaching the History of the English Language
The study of the history of the English language (HEL) encompasses a broad sweep of time and space, reaching back to the fifth century and around the globe. Further, the language has always varied from place to place and continues to evolve today. Instructors face the challenge of fitting this vast subject into one semester of study and the challenge of engaging students with unfamiliar material and techniques. This volume guides instructors in choosing among many possibilities to design an HEL course to match their own interests and institutions.
The essays consider what subjects of HEL to include, how to organize the course, and what textbook to assign. They offer historical approaches and those that are not structured by chronology. Sample assignments provide opportunities for students to conduct original research, work with archives and digital resources, and investigate language in their communities. The essays also help them question notions of linguistic correctness.
Teaching the Italian Renaissance Romance Epic
The Italian romance epic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with its multitude of characters, complex plots, and roots in medieval Carolingian epic and Arthurian chivalric romance, was a form popular with courtly and urban audiences. In the hands of writers such as Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, works of remarkable sophistication that combined high seriousness and low comedy were created. Their works went on to influence Cervantes, Milton, Ronsard, Shakespeare, and Spenser.
In this volume instructors will find ideas for teaching the Italian Renaissance romance epic along with its adaptations in film, theater, visual art, and music. An extensive resources section locates primary texts online and lists critical studies, anthologies, and reference works.
Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Behind our contemporary experience of globalization, precarity, and consumerism lies a history of colonization, increasing literacy, transnational trade in goods and labor, and industrialization. Teaching British laboring-class literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries means exploring ideas of class, status, and labor in relation to the historical developments that inform our lives as workers and members of society. This volume demonstrates pedagogical techniques and provides resources for students and teachers on autobiographies, broadside ballads, Chartism and other political movements, georgics, labor studies, satire, service learning, writing by laboring-class women, and writing by laboring people of African descent.
Teaching Modern Arabic Literature in Translation
Understanding the complexities of Arab politics, history, and culture has never been more important for North American readers. Yet even as Arabic literature is increasingly being translated into English, the modern Arabic literary tradition is still often treated as other—controversial, dangerous, difficult, esoteric, or exotic. This volume examines modern Arabic literature in context and introduces creative teaching methods that reveal the literature’s richness, relevance, and power to anglophone students.
Addressing the complications of translation head on, the volume interweaves such important issues such as gender, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the status of Arabic literature in world literature. Essays cover writers from the recent past, like Emile Habiby and Tayeb Salih; contemporary Palestinian, Egyptian, and Syrian literatures; and the literature of the nineteenth-century Nahda.
Honorable Mention in the Idaho State University Teaching Literature Book Award
Teaching Representations of the First World War
The First World War was a conflict of unprecedented proportions that saw staggering loss of life. The catalyst for huge political and social changes, the war was in part shaped through propaganda, film, photography, poetry, memoir, and music. These artistic realms, in turn, influenced gender roles, the fate of empires, extreme political movements, and new aesthetic formations.
The volume’s scope reflects the vibrancy of today’s instructors as they contend with the many issues critical for teaching the First World War in a variety of classroom settings, including
- critical paradigms used in thinking about the war, such as its relation to modernism
- the global reach of the war’s representations, including the Middle East and South Asia
- cultural motifs connected to the war, from psychiatry, pacifism, and consumer culture to the 1918 influenza pandemic
Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature
Australia and New Zealand, united geographically by their location in the South Pacific and linguistically by their English-speaking inhabitants, share the strong bond of hope for cultural diversity and social equality—one often challenged by history, starting with the appropriation of land from their indigenous peoples. This volume explores significant themes and topics in Australian and New Zealand literature. In their introduction, the editors address both the commonalities and differences between the two nations’ literatures by considering literary and historical contexts and by making nuanced connections between the global and the local. Contributors share their experiences teaching literature on the iconic landscape and ecological fragility; stories and perspectives of convicts, migrants, and refugees; and Maori and Aboriginal texts, which add much to the transnational turn.
This volume presents a wide array of writers—such as Patrick White, Janet Frame, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Witi Ihimaera, Christina Stead, Allen Curnow, David Malouf, Les Murray, Nam Le, Miles Franklin, Kim Scott, and Sally Morgan—and offers pedagogical tools for teachers to consider issues that include colonial and racial violence, performance traditions, and the role of language and translation. Concluding with a list of resources, this volume serves to support new and experienced instructors alike.
Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War
When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1863, he reportedly greeted her as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War.” To this day, Uncle Tom’s Cabin serves as a touchstone for the war. Yet few works have been selected to represent the Civil War’s literature, even though historians have filled libraries with books on the war itself.
This volume helps teachers address the following questions: What is the relation of canonical works to the multitude of occasional texts that were penned in response to the Civil War, and how can students understand them together? Should an approach to war literature reflect the chronology of historical events or focus instead on thematic clusters, generic forms, and theoretical concerns? How do we introduce students to archival materials that sometimes support, at other times resist, the close reading practices in which they have been trained?
Twenty-three essays cover such topics as visiting historical sites to teach the literature, using digital materials, teaching with anthologies; soldiers’ dime novels, Confederate women’s diaries, songs, speeches; the conflicted theme of treason, and the double-edged theme of brotherhood; how battlefield photographs synthesize fact and fiction; and the roles in the war played by women, by slaves, and by African American troops. A section of the volume provides a wealth of resources for teachers.
This volume is available for free in these e-book formats:
- MOBI format (Kindle)
- EPUB format (Nook, iPad, Sony Reader, Adobe Digital Editions, and other compatible devices and software)
Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies
Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the discourse of human rights has expanded to include not just civil and political rights but also economic, social, cultural, and, most recently, collective rights. Given their broad scope, human rights issues are useful touchstones in the humanities classroom and benefit from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural pedagogy in which objects of study are situated in historical, legal, philosophical, literary, and rhetorical contexts. Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies is a sourcebook of inventive approaches and best practices for teachers looking to make human rights the focus of their undergraduate and graduate courses.
Contributors first explore what it means to be human and conceptual issues such as law and the state. Next, they approach human rights and related social-justice issues from the perspectives of particular geographic regions and historical eras, through the lens of genre, and in relation to specific rights violations—for example, storytelling and testimonio in Latin America or poetry created in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide. Essays then describe efforts to cultivate students’ capacity for ethical reading practices and to deepen their understanding of the stakes and artistic dimensions of human rights representations, drawing on active learning and experimental class contexts. The final section, on resources, directs readers to further readings in history, criticism, theory, and literary and visual studies and provides a chronology of human rights legal documents.
Teaching the Latin American Boom
In the decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Latin American authors found themselves writing for a new audience in both Latin America and Spain and in an ideologically charged climate as the Cold War found another focus in the Cuban Revolution. The writers who emerged in this energized cultural moment—among others, Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba), José Donoso (Chile), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Manuel Puig (Argentina), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)—experimented with narrative forms that sometimes bore a vexed relation to the changing political situations of Latin America.
This volume provides a wide range of options for teaching the complexities of the Boom, explores the influence of Boom works and authors, presents different frameworks for thinking about the Boom, proposes ways to approach it in the classroom, and provides resources for selecting materials for courses
Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives
The availability of digital editions of early modern works brings a wealth of exciting archival and primary source materials into the classroom. But electronic archives can be overwhelming and hard to use, for teachers and students alike, and digitization can distort or omit information about texts. Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives places traditional and electronic archives in conversation, outlines practical methods for incorporating them into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and addresses the theoretical issues involved in studying them. The volume discusses a range of physical and virtual archives from 1473 to 1700 that are useful in the teaching of early modern literature—both major sources and rich collections that are less known (including affordable or free options for those with limited institutional resources).
Although the volume focuses on English literature and culture, essays discuss a wide range of comparative approaches involving Latin, French, Spanish, German, and early American texts and explain how to incorporate visual materials, ballads, domestic treatises, atlases, music, and historical documents into the teaching of literature.
Honorable Mention in the Idaho State University Teaching Literature Book Award
