Teaching
course Descriptions & Syllabi
Television & electronic culture
This “upper division” course is designed for English majors and minors, as well as advanced students in related fields. The course includes both regular class meetings for discussions and screening periods for assigned episodes.
Under the broader banner of “television and electronic culture,” this course focuses on recent television shows which explicitly address our cultural relationship with technology: Westworld, Archive 81, Altered Carbon, and selected episodes of Black Mirror. Students engage with theoretical concepts from posthumanism, transhumanism, new materialism, and TV studies, along with critical analyses related to science fiction, media history, and current technological advancements.
The final project is an open-ended assignment that allows students to connect class content with their own educational, personal, or career goals and assess their own progress towards those goals.
Film Analysis
This course fulfills 6,000 words of the University of Florida’s “Gordon Rule” requirement that undergraduate students write at least 24,000 words before graduation. It also serves as the English department’s introductory film course, a prerequisite for further study in film. The class includes a 3-hour weekly screening along with regular class meetings.
My objectives in this course are to introduce students to basic film terminology, a broad overview of film history, important film theories and movements, and the fundamentals of writing within the field of film studies. We screen films from diverse cultures and eras, from early film experiments to recent masterpieces.
I have taught this course multiple times, including in online and “HyFlex” formats during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each time I have the opportunity to teach this course, I strive to expand the diversity of films as well as better balance/integrate writing instruction with film content and discussion. In Spring 2022, I used an “ungrading” approach to class assessments, detailed in the syllabus below.
Fall 2020 Syllabus (online course)
Spring 2021 Syllabus (HyFlex course)
Summer 2021 Syllabus (online course)
Writing through Media: Teen Television
This course fulfills 6,000 words of the University of Florida’s “Gordon Rule” requirement that undergraduate students write at least 24,000 words before graduation. Like other “Writing through Media” classes in the English department, which have a variety of topics based on instructors’ areas of interest, the course serves a dual role as a composition class and a sort of introduction to media studies through the lens of a particular topic. The class includes a 3-hour weekly screening along with regular class meetings.
The central theme of this class is about how we as a culture define the "teenager,” with a focus on how competing definitions are disseminated, challenged, and negotiated on television. Students learn both basic film/TV analysis terminology (mise-en-scène, cinematography, etc.) and different frameworks for understanding adolescence (psychological, political, etc.). We use these skills to examine episodes of teen television, grouped thematically, and rely on the concepts from Graff & Birkenstein’s They Say, I Say to respond with our own conceptions of what it means to be a teenager.
writing through media: tensions in fandom
This course fulfills 6,000 words of the University of Florida’s “Gordon Rule” requirement that undergraduate students write at least 24,000 words before graduation. Like other “Writing through Media” classes in the English department, which have a variety of topics based on instructors’ areas of interest, the course serves a dual role as a composition class and a sort of introduction to media studies through the lens of a particular topic. The class includes a 3-hour weekly screening along with regular class meetings.
In this class, we explore the history of both media fandom and fan studies as an academic field, charting the shifts in perceptions of fans (from themselves, from mainstream culture, and from scholars) over time. We look at various tensions, controversies, “fails,” and kerfluffles within fan cultures, using these moments to spark critically engaged thought and writing. Along with academic and fan-authored readings, students frequently complete “Choose Your Own Adventure” research for homework to learn about specific fandom events and share with the class.
In Fall 2021, I used an “ungrading” approach to class assessments, detailed in the syllabus below.
Three of my students had their final fanzine projects published in the “From the Classroom” section of the academic journal ImageTexT, a section that highlights multimedia composition from undergraduates.
Writing About Children’s Media
This course fulfills 6,000 words of the University of Florida’s “Gordon Rule” requirement that undergraduate students write at least 24,000 words before graduation. The course is listed as a special topics offering for composition; these classes are designed and taught by graduate instructors with the running theme of “Writing about X.”
This class aims to build writing skills while exploring how children and childhood are constructed in contemporary American culture. We examine a variety of children’s media texts (picture books, chapter books, toys, dolls, video games, television, movies, etc.) with a goal of uncovering the ways that adults imagine the children who will consume such texts. I introduce different critical perspectives on the assumptions we make about childhood and the ways that different media communicate those assumptions, culminating in a case study of Percy Jackson and the Olympians across media adaptations.
During Spring 2020, the course did have to move suddenly online due to the outbreak of COVID-19, prompting me to rearrange the schedule and replace the final “Adventure Analysis” paper (which involved going shopping in a store) with extra discussion board posts.
Wordpress “Gallery” of Students’ Critical Making Projects (shared with permission of the class)
Fiction into film
Like all 200-level literature courses at Kansas State University, Fiction into Film aims to introduce general literary analysis and writing skills. In particular, this class also serves as an introduction to both film studies and theories of adaptation.
I adopted a fairy tale (broadly defined) theme for the course, asking students to think about how the components of a fairy tale operate on the page or the screen throughout the semester. We spent time with both fiction and film texts to understand the process of adapting a story to the screen, culminating in students creating their own short fairy tale adaptation.