Fellowships Supercharge Teaching

From the very first Course Design Zoom session, the fellowship began to enhance my approach to teaching. Don’t get me wrong, every candidate who is accepted for a fellowship has already demonstrated they are an excellent teacher. What happens is, when you get in, the fellowship supercharges your teaching by highlighting the array of genre possibilities for course projects, linking genres with multimodal designs and placing you in an inspiring environment where everyone is teaching amazing classes! As Looking around at all the cool class projects and theme inspires you to new creative teaching heights. Added to this is the encouragement and creative freedom to design your class to meet the learning objectives in any way you see fit. This is your chance to think up your dream course theme and projects. The sky is the limit.

So, dream big I did. My fall course was respectably creative themed around video games with a final ethnographic about embodied play experiences in digital worlds and even had a virtual reality avatar and game play field trip. This is a great theme for a course, and as I looked about I found a few other instructors at GT doing similar themes with games. Still, I felt the need to carve out my own unique niche, to pitch the course that only I could teach and, as it turned out, I wouldn’t be teaching it alone.

A couple months in the seeds for the course that has been germinating within me since my art school days, finally found fertile ground and a collaborator, fellow Britt and now dear friend, Jacqueline Kari. Two months into the fellowship, we ordered take-out in my apartment and hatched a plan for a class centered around our mutual passion for ekphrasis, modernist poet Gertrude Stein, Jackie’s suggestion, and, at my suggestion, a project that included students creating experimental 16mm film.

The film project made the class exceptionally unique. But, it would only be possible to do it if we located a collection of 16mm film to work with. When there’s a film department there is usually a stash of 16mm film somewhere on campus. We were referred to the LMC director of film studies, Dr. John Thorton, who told us about a huge pile of 16mm films languishing in the Price Gilbert Library basement and asked us to give it a new life. We found our stash. This was the first domino that would set all the rest in motion.

A Fellowship is an Opportunity to Reflect Deeply On Your Teaching

Not only have my course designs become more creative, the fellowship has encouraged me to think hard about what I do in the classroom, why I do it, and how I know if a class session is going well. Digital pedagogy seminar readings over the Spring semester asked us to consider every aspect of multimodal assignments from visual rhetoric and cultivating a studio classroom; teaching genre awareness; how to teach elements of sounds; classroom access issues (subtitles, color blindness, learning accommodations that benefit all), group dynamics in collaborative projects and constructive conflict and so much more. The digital pedagogy seminar in intended to develop “interactional expertise” through scholarship behind various teaching activities to supports the instructor’s teaching practice and guide how they shape the learning environment.

I already feel the effects of the seminar on my teaching practice increasing confidence through knowledge that is filling in the forest around my “pretty trees.” I have learned to write better assignment prompts and discovered how many of my class activities are HIP (High Impact Practices), which has gone from being a buzz word to an understanding of a set of characteristics that make class activities effective. The nervousness of being observed last fall yielded to reduced anxiety during my Spring teaching observation, which came from feeling more sure of myself, my lesson plan, and slightly proud to show another the activities I use for student learning in my classroom.

Fellowships are About Finding Your Complete Academic Self

In my fellowship, there has been a lot of searching, of finding people, finding resources, finding supplies, finding spaces, finding popcorn makers and red carpets: through these acts of discovery, I am finding myself and what makes me unique as an educator and a scholar and how to deploy those talents.

An early Digital Pedagogy seminar focused on publishing about pedagogy inspired everyone to consider studying, writing, and publishing about their teaching, and to collaborate with colleagues. I left class with the goal of finding a partner and coming up with something cool to study. Jackie was also looking, so whenever we ran into one another, we would toss ideas around. This led to our course design collaboration, partnering up to work on grants, teaching demos, conferences panels. Our study on impact of ekphrasis and visual arts in the classroom was IRB was approved in April, ticking another fellowship goal box.

Finding and connecting with the right people has helped me unlock my creative potential. Collaborating with Jackie, encouraged both of us to take on bigger creative risks than either of us might have felt comfortable doing alone. Collaboratively designing the ekphrasis class was a generative experience drawing upon and adding to our individual expertise in various ways. When it came time to splice, paint, scratch, and bleach the film, we had the emotional and physical support needed to tow the wagonload of supplies to class. The experience of designing and teaching the ekphrasis-film class underscores another important aspect of fellowships: You are there to network and make life-long professional contacts and friends.

A Fellowship is Job Market Preparation

The fellowship provides preparation for hitting the job market that many students don’t get during grad school. In just one year of the fellowship, I have completely revamped my CV, my teaching philosophy, added a couture teaching moment, and now write my cover letters for my reader. Opening with a tripartite thesis tailored to the job advertisement as well as incorporating language from the job description into the topic sentences are simple but transformative changes.

The requirement of experimental highly creative course designs is actually related to the job market. That extra-creative course you design will provide you with what Melissa Ianetta called in the jobs seminar, a “boutique teaching moment” that will define your identity as an instructor, sit as the center jewel that demonstrates your teaching philosophy, and provide the shining highlight of your cover letter, and proof that your interest in teaching goes beyond teaching for food. Reactions and conversations with WCP directors and my cohort has reassured me the ekphrasis-film course is the boutique moment I was searching for. While I did not manage to get on the job market this past fall—I had so much to learn!—I feel 100% more ready for the next time I try.

Going the Distance

The saga of the 2000-mile road trip with my partner Jon to set me up in an apartment in Atlanta has folded the country in half as we visit one another back and forth. In a blink, I pass from walking back from the Lidl grocery in Atlanta to the desert wash with my three dogs tugging me forward in December. A text message on a February afternoon opens the apartment door to stunned glee at Jon’s surprise visit for my birthday. Blink again, and I’m catching a Lyft from campus to the airport for Spring break. Then there’s a knock at the apartment door on Thursday night in April as I rapidly look back and forth from my phone call in-progress with Jon back to his face suddenly real in the apartment unable to process reality for a second. He flew in the night before the film festival to make good on his promise to operate the popcorn maker. The jubilation of visits breaks up the dull ache of the long weeks in between. But each visit also comes pre-packaged with the unavoidable pain of departure.

The effects of long-term distance seeps into speech in little phrases. The effects of maintaining separate larders generates artifacts of separation. When shopping the phrase “do you (instead of we) have walnuts?” stumbles out. It emerges in loss of familiarity with pantry contents— “I didn’t know we had potatoes!” “There’s just enough leftover tofu for you tomorrow,” leaks out, the after I leave, hanging unspoken in the air. It creeps into television: “You already watched that? Oh, I was waiting to watch it with you.” The phrase “goodbye” is banished from phone calls, replaced with “talk soon, love you,” kissed into the receiver. The more distance begins to feel routine, the greater the desire to purge it from conversation becomes. At times, separation stokes the intensity of connection, and, at others, the spirit collapses under the weariness of the long wear of time reduced to “quite simple desperate human” want for presence.

Now, the distance between us is about to be tripled.

While I didn’t get onto the regular job market, my improved cover-letter writing skills did land the Assistant Director of First Year writing position on the Georgia Tech Europe Campus in Metz France for the fall semester. I am excited to take on the challenge of my new administrative duties in the study abroad program as well teaching and living in France. I have adapted my ekphrastic course theme and activities to center around a pedagogy of place to emphasize the study abroad experience. We will read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and meditate upon who we are at home and abroad. Going on field trips to art museums such as the Oldmasters museum in Brussels and discussing Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (a painting that has provoked many ekphrastic responses) in person will be a teaching dream come true!

My excitement is tempered by the sobering nine-hour time difference that will separate Jon and I. This increased distance will test us in new ways. When it is night for me it will be morning for him, so we’ll have to find the right time of day to connect for a video chat. We will need to text using services like WhatsApp instead of cell coverage. There will be only one visit to break up the time– Jon will come for a week around October. The phrase “je t’aime” will circulate our lexicon on repeat.

When I first moved to Atlanta at the start of the fellowship I wrote, the “Two of the greatest resources we have are time and knowledge.” These were Jon’s words to me when I accepted the fellowship followed by an exhortation to make the trade worth it. It is not a trade I make lightly. The position in Metz is yet another opportunity to gain incredible knowledge and I must again make the time spent worth it.

It’s been a long road to get here. It all started with a conversation in line last September to get books signed after a Poetry@Tech reading when Jackie and I were bouncing around course ideas, and she asked me what I thought about ekphrasis. I said, “I’m nuts for it!” “What for it?” she queried, mishearing. I laughed and said, “Yes.” When I emailed her later that week to ask if she was serious, she said yes. The seed took root.

With an October spring course deadline fast approaching, the planning began in earnest. We brainstormed class project ideas, co-wrote the course description, and collaborated to write a GT Arts Microgrant. We crossed our fingers, hoping for the grant to be approved, wondering a little what would happen if it didn’t. The grant was to purchase tabletop film-editing viewers, which would greatly improve the student experience in selecting segments of 16mm found footage. Luck and a strong grant application were on our side, and the grant came through. Another stroke of luck came in the form of a donation of a huge pile of old 16mm films that had been languishing in the library basement. We now had plenty of film for the students to scratch, bleach, glitter, and paint on.

Piloting a new course is like laying train tracks to cross a wide gorge, building the road for a train that is already fast-approaching. The new tracks are laid often mere moments before the train, averting the spectacular collapse. Class had already begun, and the grant had just come through. I spent three-quarters of it immediately on buying vintage table-top editors off of eBay, news Jackie received with equanimity. With three table-viewers, two newly purchased and my own personal viewer, art supplies, and a wagon-load of film, we were ready for project two.

Unable to secure a dedicated space, we braced ourselves for two weeks of setting up and breaking down everything each day. We attended each other’s classes to help haul the supply wagon and set up equipment on the tables in the Crosland Library Rooms we had reserved for the purpose. And, it was great having two professors on hand to help students learn how to use the film viewers and splice film, then how to bleach, scratch, and paint it.

The pivotal mid-gorge track was coming up—securing scanning services to digitize the students’ films. Students had been selecting and painting on film for about a week. Kodak said they might be able to scan the films, but they were concerned that the heavily hand-manipulated films would gum up the gears of their black magic scanner. We couldn’t risk being turned away at the last minute at this pivotal juncture of the project. We turned to our second contact, a film restoration group called CinePost. We arrived at the center of the gorge, and the vital tracks to scan the student films were laid just in time. Not only did CinePost scan the films, but they were also delighted to collaborate with us and are keen to share their film knowledge with students. We are very much looking forward to working with them again!

There have been lots of other things that have come together to make our class film festival sparkle. The Coordinator of Student Programming at the Ferst Center of the Arts, Santana Nash, is loaning us their popcorn maker along with a Georgia Tech photo backdrop. Light up G and T letters are being borrowed from the Center for Teaching and Learning, and a strip of red carpet borrowed from Dr. John Thornton in LMC film studies, will complete our movie-star selfie set-up.

But more than anything else, the most essential factor in the success of this class has been the tremendous open-minded and inquisitive nature of our students. Not only were they unfazed by the challenge of working with the old medium of analog film, but they also embraced the unfamiliar with a kind of intellectual fearlessness, eager to see what new ideas might emerge from the constraints. Each student used the process as a catalyst for thoughtful reflection, articulating what each creative choice revealed about their vision and their developing artistic voice.

Our film festival is a celebration of the incredible journey of two Brittain post-doc fellows as they co-designed and taught a wildly creative new multimodal writing course, and of the amazing students who joined us on this adventure.

Part of the excitement of participating in Tech Art Fest is that, to participate, our students had to write exhibit labels for their films, which is an immediate callback to the very first project in our class, where students wrote exhibit labels for works of art they looked at. So, this past Monday, I spent the first part of class reviewing the genre of exhibit labels one more time to prepare them to write a label for their film.

Pedagogical discussions often consider knowledge transfer by focusing on how skills learned in the composition classroom will transfer and be used by students in other classes or in future employment. But skills learned in a class are also immediately useful and apply to the rest of the assignments in the class and other campus community learning opportunities, something the exhibit of the student films underscores dramatically. It was gratifying to provide students with a very clear skill learned -> use skill situation that highlighted the usefulness of the genre we studied by engaging with it again for a genuine practical application. It is a worthwhile, high-impact practice for instructors to consider ways of demonstrating the payoff of skills learned in subsequent class projects and campus activities

Next up is our class film festival, where students will use the public speaking skills they developed in class to introduce a film created by another student film group to a real audience.

The student-painted films are the course highlight of the Spring English 1102 course that Jackie and I dreamed up together last fall, titled Tender Buttons, Moving Pictures: Visual Literacy and Ekphrasis. With help from a GT Arts Microgrant and a Poetry@Tech grant, we were able to make the class happen; the funding allowed us to purchase two vintage film editing table viewers and pay to have the student films scanned at Cinepost.

Like analog film, the term ekphrasis experienced a reduction, becoming increasingly narrow in meaning and use. So, our composition learning objectives include restoring the original Sophist definition of ekphrasis, from when it was taught in the ancient rhetoric classroom (around 323 BC) as a sophisticated tool of argument that changes as John of Sardis explains, what is said “from being heard to being seen” by “inscrib[ing] what is described in the eyes of the spectators and paints the truth in the imagination” (Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric 219, George Alexander Kennedy, 2003). In other words, description is argument. What we choose to describe makes a claim as to what is important and worth noticing. Being able to get others to see what you are trying to say is a useful communication skill. In our class, we have been experimenting with various activities to reclaim ekphrasis in the contemporary composition classroom, our rationale for painting on film.

Film is perhaps the ideal medium with which to form an ekphrastic response to Tender Buttons. The film industry was emerging at the same time that Gertrude Stein was developing her experimental writing- the rise of a revolutionary new visual medium and the revolutionary language of the slender volume of Tender Buttons is not a coincidence. The repetition with micro-variation, jumpcuts, and flickering loops of film is visually analogous to the reading experience of Stein’s “continuous present,” which the author herself acknowledged: by “doing what the cinema was doing...I had not many things but one thing” (Portraits and Repetition, 176-177). The goal of having our students work frame-by-frame with film is to experience the tactility of Stein’s language experiments as they adapt her work to the visual + time-based medium of film, and construct a descriptive argument in moving-picture form, about what is happening thematically in a few of Stein’s poems. Arranging film is like stitching together a visual sentence.

Walking into the Cinepost film restoration lab was like being dropped into a jumpcut in which old and new film tech had been grafted together cheek-by-jowl. Heavy cans of film line shelves adjacent to work tables with large flat-screen monitors and digital editing equipment. I admire a classic hand-cranked tabletop reel-to-reel, the solid grey metal of a traditional tape splicer, and an impressive Marie-Hancock hot splicer, and mentally add them to my course supply wishlist. Taking the first strips from a student project bag, film technician Bob Castro begins a monologue of film history that matches the speed of hands splicing film with the facility of years of practice. He is among the generation of filmmakers who edited with a blade when the “undo” button didn’t exist. Between explanations of the essential features of top-notch splicing units and stories of the fearful combustibility of nitrate films, Castro expresses hope of engaging students in learning about analog film technology to preserve it for future generations. Walking by, Cinepost owner Myron Leneski leans in the doorway to add his agreement with this sentiment. Jackie and I exchange a quick smile and suggest establishing an internship with the GT film department.

The first student film pieces have been spliced, wound onto a reel, and carried over to a wall-sized scanner rigged out like a Rube Goldberg machine with a variety of wheels, pegs, and a couple of padded yellow pencils angled to stabilize the “flutter” of the old film as it threads through and passes beneath a high-resolution lens. A few moments later, Jean Simmons as Ophelia appears on a monitor floating down the river set of Laurence Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet. I chuckle to myself as I remember a group of my female students a couple of weeks ago, huddled around the small screen of an old green Moviola viewer, admiring the handsome jib of Laurence, comparing him to a recent Superman, Henry Cavill.

Introducing young audiences to classic films and film history is a secondary benefit of our class film project, which underscores a broader issue at play in the relationship between analog and digital media. The rise of mass-produced digital images, AI slop, and deep fakes has sparked a crisis of truth and a decline in the cultivation of analog skills. As we become increasingly uncertain about what is real, a resurgence in interest in analog film and photography seems likely, as it offers an offline counterweight that is reassuringly tangible and requires physical and mental dexterity to work with, while also slowing down the process. In the meantime, our class also meets the skill requirements for using AI as the user interface is inherently ekphrastic; we must clearly describe to get it to produce what we want, which means using it successfully requires that we become more adept practitioners of ekphrasis. Our class balances on the divide between old and new, digital and analog.

All the student films have been scanned, and digital files of the painted footage have been given to our student groups. I am excited to see how they revise and edit their films to hone their visual arguments using repetition, digital splicing, pacing, loops, and sound. In a few weeks’ time, we will premiere the student films at our course film festival, where we will share their ekphrastic moving picture arguments with the Georgia Tech community.

The freedom of coasting around Midtown on a bike instead of a car allowed for the discovery of new places to eat. I spotted a restaurant boasting rooftop tacos and drinks, which will make for a fun Spring evening adventure. I also found a new coffee nook called Illy that has a great little breakfast menu, a tempting array of pastries, avocado toast, and a caprese salad that I will be back for very soon.

But today, I wanted to be outside. I picked up a Guava Kambucha at a grocery store and wheeled over to the tiny Pardis Park nearby and found a shady spot within the Greco-Roman inspired pillars adjacent to the petite Millennium Gate museum. Every few minutes, another dog with family in tow strolls by my alcove.

The past couple weeks of the fellowship have been packed with extra work because the second semester of the fellowship brings with it the addition of committee work. I joined the jobs committee, so I am tasked with reviewing the applications of potential new Britts, which, of course, brought my own application experience hurtling back to mind, infusing the review experience with sympathy for the challenge of composing a successful cover letter.

It is interesting to think that about this time last year, I had recently applied to the fellowship and could only wonder about what might happen. In a matter of weeks, I will experience being on the other side of the interview. It is fitting to bring compassion forged from the memory of being in the hot seat into the interview moment.

I’m in the home stretch of my second semester and will soon complete my first year of the three-year Brittain fellowship. Time, as they say, flies by. Now, I often wonder what comes after this. But my colleague Jackie reminded me the other day of the necessity of living in the moment with a quote from Leo Tolstoy:

Some days in the fellowship can feel as long as that 25-mile walk, especially lately, with the challenging yet rewarding creative teaching activities going on the past couple of weeks in my Spring courses (something I will post about in due time).

Listening to the spray of the fountains in the pond, with the grand limestone arch, resembling the Paris Arc de Triomphe, looming above, I am resting for a moment, enjoying lovely weather, and I feel hopeful that good things lie ahead on this 1000+ mile journey.

Annual Review - Research & Creative Projects Section

In my review I documented select scholarly projects that I took on during the fall semester. I wrote about the GT Arts Microgrant that myself and my fellow Brit Jackie applied for (and were since awarded!). I wrote about meeting with the director of GT Center for Teaching and Learning to refine the language of the grant language and elements of the course Jackie and I were designing for Spring. I then explained how this discussion helped to plan a pedagogy study to conduct in conjunction with the spring class. My next annual review will discuss the IRB application to conduct this study that I recently completed. Additionally, I discussed the book chapter I submitted (that was just confirmed as accepted last week!). As is becoming evident in this paragraph, the annual review documents a career trajectory charting professional activities begun and the eventual fruits of those labors. In my review next year will get to recount the blossoming of my fall efforts.

Annual Review - The Teaching Section

In the review, you also write about your teaching accomplishments such as courses and assignments designed and class activities I wrote adopting a labor-based grading system that I chose because it emphasizes process over final product. I also discussed the AI-assisted peer review system PAIRR (by UC Davis) that I tried out in my courses and worked well. I talked about the Virtual Reality Field trip for my students that I planned with a librarian media specialist and what my students learned from the experience. I shared the “Mini-Con” gaming conference in which my students shared the findings of their digital ethnography reports in a real but low-stakes fun conference-style experience.

The teaching section also includes an evaluative component where you touch on the course instructor evaluations. This section is tough, as anyone involved in academia well-knows the pain caused by this problematic system. My solution to ease my own suffering was to use AI to read my reviews and have it give me a summary. I found this quite useful as it provided me with a quick comprehensive break down of my strengths as a teacher and my main areas for improvement in a way that tracked trends instead of isolated comments. Ultimately, the evaluative component of the annual review is there as part of an effort to support your teaching and provide some guidance where you might need it.

After writing the section on teaching you put together a portfolio of 10 to 20 pages that provides examples of what you discussed. This includes things like syllabi for classes you designed, assignment instruction sheets, in-class activities, lesson plans examples of student work, and relevant comments made by your peer observer. I got carried away and started putting examples of everything! I was at 48 pages when I doubled checked the page count again and then had to cut half of it. 🙄 This forced me to curate a tighter collection of teaching materials.

Completing the annual review is as helpful to the writer as it is to the one who will review it. It lets you self-assess where you have put your efforts, if those efforts are well placed, and how your professional journey is going. It also helps you practice talking about, explaining, what you are doing to yourself and others. This will come in handy during a job interview.

Everyone I know in academia is doing amazing things! The review lets you officially document those amazing things, what is interesting about them, and the challenges you face along the way which will, one day, assist you in applying for a promotion or tenure.

Planning

In-class, we began by identifying student communication strengths and challenges and then brainstorming ways to visually represent those challenges using simple sketches on paper paired with a written description beneath. Many picked oral communication, sharing the common dread of public speaking while others cited struggles with electronic and written modes.

Student sketches playfully poked fun at weaknesses. Stick figures hesitated and “ummed” before classroom podiums and trembled in front of audiences of impatient stuffed animals. Another sketch depicted googling for help with speeches on a laptop. Writing, electronic, and visual communication struggles took the form of crossed-out drafts, emails with errors, and glitching laptops. Electronic skills showed up in sketches of editing processes on computer screens with plans for voice-over.

Initial sketches and script plans were followed up with discussing the sketches in groups and then coming up with an alternative plan so that students had a few to choose from and could decide which one they liked best and which seemed most feasible.

Final Product

Everyone left class with confidence and plan: What they recorded and submitted was even better! One video portrayed public speaking skill through an influencer makeup tutorial video and included memes to highlight struggles with written and electronic communication. Another video showcased electronic editing skill with an 80’s music video aesthetic in which, through the magic of video editing the student doubled themself on screen and provided this double with public speaking advice. Electronic communication challenges were highlighted with exaggerated bad editing through out-of-sync video talking to voice, a too loud nightclub drowning out speech, and washed-out scenes. Video editing prowess was demonstrated with exposition of a software video editing process integrated into the video scenes and interwoven with voice-over and scenes of the student discussing strengths and challenges.

Public speaking challenges took the form of exaggerated bad performances and text messages popping up to voice internal anxiety. The aforementioned stuffed animal audience appeared moving from hostile to assuaged as the performance improved. False starts and word-stumbles paired with the rainbow bars of technical difficulties were also used to highlight speaking challenges in several videos. One such sequence concluded with a Sponge Bob “two thousand years later” screen that had me crying with laughter. One video dramatized the terror of public speaking with a halting classroom speech that cut to a relaxed dorm-room chat and broke the fourth wall with a false ending, “what, you’re still here?,” and then wrapped up with final thoughts.

Ironically, as each student considered ways to visually portray weaker skill that very skill was already becoming stronger. Confronted humor and laughter public speaking fears were already shrinking. Through crafting the video, electronic skills were already improving. Writing and visual communication skills were nudging forward by pinpointing and discussing process road-blocks. Each video turned a weakness into a strength and used it to fuel their narrative and editing choices.

Every student found a unique and creative entry point into this class project. The careful thought, boldness, and humor applied to this first task has me super excited to see what they do with the creative class projects I have in store for them.

My partner and I tinkered with bits of metal, clear squares, plastic lids, and an LED candle, feeling for the new shape the parts were inclined to take. After the workshop, I reflected on the various missteps of my week and how they changed my path.

Travel Missteps

Flying to Atlanta front the west coast always feels like a misstep, like tripping on the stairs and skipping two. The missing hours, lost in the sky, create a cosmic imbalance that takes a few days to recalibrate for internally. Yet strangely, I always get a lot of work done while suspended in that time void. Buckled into my seat, I spent my Sunday flight completing my review of an article on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

Disembarking, I flick open Lyft and the app prompts me to re-register. I had gotten a new phone during the break and, of course, I had forgotten to update the app. I get through the process and click request a ride, stupidly thinking it will take some time for the ride to arrive and it tells me the ride will be there in three minutes. It is the airport; ride requests are always three seconds away. Now I’m in a mad rush to get to baggage claim. Every tram ride is packed like a sardine can—I can’t get on. I miss my ride and am charged $6 dollars for my failure. I learn that it’s possible, although not preferable, to get to baggage claim without taking the tram. I finally get my luggage and now have to pull two suitcases, an oversized and a carry-on, behind me. I’m the equivalent of a double-wide trailer on the single lane roads of the escalator walkways. I’m a stone in the river of people that divides around me at the bottom of a mechanized waterfall where I am momentarily stuck fumbling to reorient my luggage.

I request another Lyft and spend the journey listening to the driver mutter on the phone in Spanish. As we approach, he starts to turn into the wrong parking area and I have to intervene quickly. English is not working, so I flip into Spanish startling the driver and directing him to the small parking lot near my front door. I can’t help but smile inside at defying the monolingual expectation. He asks me where I’m from and deposits my luggage on the sidewalk. Repositioning once more into trailer position, I haul the two suitcases to my door. Slipping the key in the door, I breathe a sigh of relief. The recurring nightmare of having forgotten to lock it and arriving at an empty space ransacked by thieves dissolves.

Malfunctioning Mechanisms

Dragging the bags in, I collapse for a moment in a chair and then use the restroom. The toilet handle clacks loosely, disengaged. I desperately click it a few more times and then call Jon. Directed to open the tank, I squeamishly open the lid to investigate; not only is the chain detached, but the rod is rusted and part of it breaks off. Armored in dishwashing gloves, I manage to hook the chain clip into a hole in the rotting rod and feel giddy relief that it works again and a little proud that I was able to repair the mysterious plumbing hidden in the ceramic box. I finish unpacking and stay up too late prepping for class the next day.

I feel the misstep of going to bed late in class the next day. A few slides are missing and some files are saved in the wrong place. My jet-lagged brain is functioning more slowly, and things that are normally not hard, like file organization and double authentication logins, are suddenly more challenging. Rather than a podium, the classroom layout puts my back to the class while using the computer on a narrow table next to the wall. I let go of looking at my slides the whole time, sit at the table with my students and talk through a modified version of my missing icebreaker slide. Adaptability is better than perfection.

Despite a fitful night of trying to sleep with a body still on Pacific Coast time, I head out the next morning to stock up on groceries, getting to my car only to discover the battery died during the winter break. The winter cold dealt a final blow to a battery that was likely already on the brink. Roadside assistance from GEICO arrives an hour later, but they can’t find the parking garage; directions are explained, phone location pinged, and finally, my car is jumped, and I head out with strict instructions from Jon to go straight to Costco and not to stop anywhere until a new battery is installed.

At Costco, they sell car batteries, but to my surprise, do not install them. A tire shop employee generously provides my car with the necessary jump to get to PepBoys, where I am informed that Costco sold me the wrong battery. I take a deep breath and can only laugh at the absurdity of life. PepBoys sells me another battery and I while away the hour and a half wait for installation shopping for comfy sneakers for teaching, and am rewarded with a 10% discount by PepBoys for my patience. Back at Costco, I manage to heft the boulder-heavy cube into a shopping cart and head in to return it and complete my original grocery shopping mission. The day was finally back on track, and cute sneakers were also en route.

Backstepping into the Absurd

Tired as I was, it would’ve perhaps been understandable to become angry and frustrated, but I remained in curiously good spirits. The detached observer that we all harbor within watched the highjacking of the day unfold with silent twinkling laughter. Unexpected travails catch us off guard. As missteps accumulate, and we are drawn further and further from our usual path, we lose the insulation of routine and come into naked contact with the absurd:

“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” ― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays.

The irrational is always present but held at bay by the bulwark of calendars, emails, and to-dos that we use to find the happiness of purpose, to frame our existence with meaning, to make life make sense. The missteps of the day, and, really, the last three days, had allowed the absurd to creep out into the open. Every small failure bumped the line of my path, jolting my awareness, breaking patterns of movement in the airport, disrupting social interactions and communication, interrupting the mechanisms of brain, plumbing, and circuits. Every rupture is a reminder that there is no set order to life. The “equilibrium” of life, as Albert Camus explains, is a “perpetual opposition between [a] conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles”:

I can’t control what fate sends my way—from dead car batteries to lost slides—but I can decide how to respond to it. And rather than fixating on “best” or perfect outcomes, I sometimes find mischievous pleasure in deviations that keep me alert to my surroundings, that test my stamina, that force me to learn and adapt—We often get more “living” out of failures and missteps because they rip away the lethargy of ease.

Back at the workshop, we put the final touches on our 80’s sci-fi inspired assemblage, adding a few more buttons. Inspired by artist Dylan Cawthorne’s workshop lecture, I dub our piece “un-voltaic.” The meditation on failed solar cells inspired a console of self-replicating light that, if ever turned on, would almost certainly self-destruct.

For academic faculty, postdocs, and grad students, the winter break between semesters is spent enjoying the holidays with loved ones, but a large part of that time is also spent prepping syllabi and content for the Spring semester, working on essays for articles, working on proposal for future conferences, and for many, attending the annual Modern Language Association conference to present our research and attend the presentations of others.

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Next Saturday at 3:30 pm EST, I am doing a virtual presentation for MLA 2026 conference. #MLA2026. My presentation is the culmination of work that began a year ago. The process began with recruiting two colleagues, Dr. Kelleen O’ConnelMock and Dr. Shoshana Magnet to present with me, then writing a proposal that stitched our projects into a cohesive panel.

It was my first time assembling and submitting a complete panel, rather than just submitting an abstract to join a panel formed by someone else. I reviewed previous successful proposals to learn how to structure mine. I also considered how my proposal could fit into MLA’s 2026 theme of family resemblance. Lastly, the text had to be squeezed several times to squish it down to fit the required word count. The proposal below is what I submitted:

Frames of Resistance: Feminist Embodied Pedagogy in the Graphic Novel Classroom

The papers and activities in this panel explore the role of visual language and alternative visual texts in supporting embodied learning. Each presenter will offer a classroom activity related to a graphic novel that helps students process their social environment, navigate pathways through trauma, and appreciate diverse ways of thinking and knowing, ultimately empowering individual subjectivity and agency. Examining embodiment is crucial to understanding one’s identity and the broader network of family and community.

David J. Nguyen and Jay B. Larson argue that “embodied learning... facilitates perception and disruption” of “oppressed and oppressor” roles, making it crucial for “feminism and critical race theory.” They echo John Dewey’s caution in The School and Society (1899) and Democracy of Education (1916) that passive instruction leads to compliance with authoritarian structures. Conversely, an embodied approach promotes autonomous, reflective students who discover critical and ethical truths. This indicates that embodied pedagogy is not only a more effective teaching method but also anti-fascist. The renewed interest in Dewey’s pragmatism and embodied pedagogy parallels the global rise of authoritarian regimes.

However, as Sheila Macrine and Jennifer Fugate note in “Embodied Learning: Translating Embodied Cognition Research” (2024), embodied pedagogy has not achieved the anticipated greater impact on educational theory and policy, despite evidence of its benefits for educators. The session panelists support Macrine and Fugate’s goal to enhance embodied pedagogy and bridge the “research-to-practice” gap by showcasing activities that empower student-embodied learning and challenge dominant narratives.

From Panel to Pedagogy: Rhetorical Embodiment in Visual Storytelling - Jenessa Kenway, Georgia Inst. of Tech.

Jenessa Kenway’s paper examines how aesthetic engagement—viewing and creating art—serves as a powerful tool for feminist pedagogy in composition classrooms. Using Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to SuperHuman Strength, students explore Bechdel’s panel composition and character embodiment to represent identity and emotion. Students then sketch simple comic-inspired panels representing their own experiences and rhetorical embodiment. This approach aligns with Dewey’s view of art as a participatory experience that transforms both creator and audience. Luca F. Ticini et al. explain in Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind that aesthetic experiences “activate shared brain mechanisms” influencing cognition, sensation, and empathy. This principle supports feminist pedagogy, emphasizing knowledge construction through sensory engagement. Drawing allows students to explore rhetorical and physical embodiment, using visual narratives for meaning-making and activating cognitive and emotional processes.

Therapeutic Representation in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? - Shoshana Magnet, U of Ottawa

Shoshana Magnet’s presentation explores how images enter the body and how the process of visual description helps metabolize images disrupted or fractured by trauma. Magnet analyzes the role of visually representing the therapeutic process in Alison Bechdel’s autographic memoirs. This paper stems from earlier work (Magnet and Diamond, 2008) aimed at theorizing the pedagogical challenges of addressing difficult material in feminist classrooms, including how individual students expressed their struggles in metabolizing the ongoing realities of a world shaped by homophobia, racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and other forms of systemic discrimination. As feminist professors have long observed, students frequently seek resources to help them manage these feelings. While counseling services are often suggested to students, Magnet found that many did not understand how therapeutic services might benefit them. Her presentation examines the embodiment present in Fun Home and Are You My Mother? and how comics can be used to demonstrate the therapeutic process works and its benefits.

Transcending Embodied Gender Norms through the Graphic Novel - Kelleen O’Connell-Mock, C of Southern Nevada

Kelleen O’Connell Mock decolonizes academia using visual texts like Bechdel’s Fun Home and N.D. Stevenson’sNimona to help students analyze body and gender identity. These texts are “Gynotopias,” which Bonnie Zare describes as tools for envisioning change (2003). Research indicates that trans students often fear negative outcomes when revealing their non-binary identities (Randolph et al., 2008). Understanding trauma from hiding or experiencing violence is crucial in college teaching and student writing (Clinnin, 2020). These alternative texts foster safer environments for exploring gender identities and challenge conventional writing (Graff, 2010). Autographic novels illustrate personal embodied rhetorical situations, enhancing students’ awareness and ability to confront colonized gender norms (Mintz, 2021; Parker et al., 2017). O’ConnellMock’s activity involves drawing and AI to create personal rhetorical situation monsters inspired by Nimona to empower marginalized students.

Each 15-minute presentation connects practical applications of embodied feminist pedagogy with one graphic novel. Each presentation includes a 5-7minute activity demo for participants to complete. The panel includes insights from early, mid, and late career scholars from different locations and institutions who arrived at embodied visual pedagogy in different ways: visual art, therapy, and composition. Each paper uses graphic narratives to foster interactive, embodied aesthetic learning experiences that promote critical thinking and civic engagement.

A little about my demo

For my teaching demo, I will first present a short essay about Alison Bechdel that sets up my concepts. Then, I will direct participants to the Padlet page I created for my session, where we will draw single comic panels telling a story about personal rhetorical embodiment. This is going to be fun. To my Britts and other colleagues attending, I hope to see you there!

My brand new course theme this past fall semester brought MMORPG video games into the classroom and the assignments to explore embodiment in virtual worlds. Last summer, as I developed the course, I wondered silently to myself whether non-gamers would still enjoy and learn from it? Would the academic rigor drain the fun? My batch of reflective essays this semester was filled with encouraging evidence that course projects, efforts to make learning fun, and the course theme had all worked better than I had could have imagined.

A Class for Gamers and Nongamers Alike

Many student reflective essays opened with a statement of humorous delight to find expectations of a typical boring college English class overturned. Many students expressed gleeful surprise to find video games discussed and even *gasp* played during class time.

Even non-gamers were relieved that the class was nothing like the restrictive, repetitive English courses they had had in the past and expressed excitement about exploring identity, community, and communication through gaming. And, despite initial reservations, non-gamers still found things to like and learned through the process. Even those not thrilled by the course theme ultimately found themselves content to have gone on the journey, and were surprised that video games could explore such deep, complex ideas, and, even better, found their communication skills improving with each course project, and found that the course theme encouraged growth in unexpected ways.

So, playing and discussing games wasn’t just fun, it also facilitated transformative learning experiences. Students mentioned that a videogame-oriented class really helped them stay engaged while also improving their communication skills. Quite a few remarked that not only did they gain knowledge about video games, but they also grew as communicators through the process.

One student recounted that a favorite day in class was bringing a PlayStation to play a favorite childhood video game during a collaborative ethnographic study-play session with their class research team. That class play experience was cited as key to growth as a communicator and contributed to the realization of just how immersive and interactive the digital worlds of video games can be.

Others highlighted how each assignment intentionally targeted different communication elements, requiring them to adapt their communication strategies, and found that this helped them understand that writing is an iterative process that evolves based on the audience, purpose, and medium. Some students noted that the course was structured around active exploration rather than passive observation. Others explained that while they were not accustomed to creating graphics, designing avatars, or considering how digital environments influence self-presentation, each project challenged them in a way that encouraged them to rethink the concept of communication.

Looking through an Avatar Glass Darkly

One class project asked students to design a gaming avatar and then write a statement explaining their design choices. Several students wrote about the avatar project, citing it as what at first seemed a simple task of choosing hair and clothes, only to discover that explaining their choices pulled them into a deeper discussion of identity, gender, heritage, nationality, and more. They also noted, with surprise, how many identity traits are invisible, which prompted them to find ways to represent those features. Lastly, linking the project with Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow and Sherry Turkle’s, Life On the Screen, allowed students to explore undesired traits or aspirational characteristics through their avatar.

Getting Our Mini-Con On

The final course group project was a digital ethnographic report, which concluded with a Mini-Con; a mini ethnographic gaming convention in which the students presented their findings derived from research and game play and provided the students with an academic conference-style experience. I planned the Mini-Con to conclude with recognition awards for various categories. I created and printed out custom award stickers to give out for categories that included “Best Unexpected Discovery,” “Coolest Digital Artifact,” “Most Engaging Hook,” “Most Immersive Scrapbook,” and “Strongest Team Synergy.” This was one of my somewhat last-minute, labor-intensive ideas. I felt strongly that it was a good idea, but it was quite a bit of work to make happen, so I questioned whether or not it was really worth it. IT WAS!

The Mini-Con came up again and again in student reflections. Many students discussed with pleasure having this final opportunity to showcase their work, design skills, and how much their oral and nonverbal presentation skills had grown over the semester. One student who had struggled with the first class presentation related with pride awards won for “Most Engaging Hook” and “Coolest Digital Artifact.” These awards were cited as key pieces of evidence of development, showing former weaknesses—public speaking and multimodal design— had become strengths.

None of this is to say that the class was perfect or went off without a hitch. As happens the first time teaching any new class, there are many things I plan to adjust, reorder, and improve. I also have my eyes set on moving from PC and console video games to VR games in the next iteration of the class. But for now, there is enough evidence to suggest that this class is worth teaching again.

On a side note, I was at a Christmas party talking about this class with a high school guidance counselor who told me that this is the kind of English class they need in high schools. So, who knows where else this course design might go… 🤔😉

That does it for my first six months as a Brittain postdoc. It’s time to surrender to cookie-baking, hot cocoa, and beagle cuddles around the fire pit in the backyard of my desert home. See you next year!

It has been an exciting whirlwind! There were seminars and close-reading symposiums, syllabus riddles and deep reflections on pedagogy, mission statement brain-‘splosions, cover letter and CV overhauls, afternoon ruminations and mandala tracing at the High, GT micro art grant applications and course planing for spring all while each new Brit flies and builds the plane of their brand new fall course while adjusting to postdoc life.

Going Solo

It is not something I want to get used to but I am coping with soloing it in the apartment. I will say it reduces the number of distractions. With less personal concerns taking my time I throw myself into my work, which distracts me from being alone. While separation can be a distraction, my partner, Jon, is collaborator, confidant, idea springboard, and champion in my corner helping me work through ideas and cheering me on. The long-distance testing of our mettle reveals an alloy of great strength— the chord which sounds plaintive yet tender when apart renews brighter when together.

Favorite Teaching Moment

My favorite teaching moment accomplished my goal of bringing my research and modernist expertise into my composition classroom, and, amazing, this moment managed to happen during the peer observation of my class. For class we read the modernist short story, Virginia Woolf’s “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motorcar” and used it as a springboard to think about the many fragments of which every person’s self is composed. We talked of the various selves we have encountered when on vacation road trips and the colloquy of selves— “eager and dissatisfied,” “stern and philosophical” in Woolf’s story, considering the internal dialogue that takes place and what these moments tell us about the formation of identity. As we looked at the “little figure” ”made that day,” in the story “advancing through beauty, through death” surrounded by “great sheer slabs of rock [and] tree tufted” there on [the speaker’s] knee,” the link between figurative selves and world building composed in the imagination and characters made in video games clicked into place in my student’s mind setting up the next question: what aspects of our selves are present in the video games characters that we make? This set up exploring video games as a tool extending the embodied cognitive process.

Choosing a Shape

My journey to becoming a competitive job applicant has been transformative. I see very clearly now the shortcomings of my previous job materials. The jobs seminar revolutionized my approach to CVs, cover letters, and teaching statements going from a loose bag of teaching tricks to a persuasive conversation directed at my reader. It has also changed my approach to crafting the themes of the courses I teach with a mind to shaping myself into the candidate for the jobs I want to apply for. While I’m not going to discuss it in depth right now I will just say that the course I am teaching for the spring semester has been designed to draw upon my full potential as an instructor and modernist literary scholar with a studio art background.

Looking back to look forward

The experience designing the spring class also opened a small keyhole into the past that throws into relief how much I have grown while affirming essentials elements of myself are still the same. The techniques for class projects that I’m bringing in draw upon artistic passions from my undergraduate days in art school. The language used to solicit collaboration in my emails verify interest to pursue genuine mutually beneficial connection. And I notice that the tenor of my communication harkens back to early experiences playing video games, seeking team-ups to complete quests.

Many years ago, I was playing a video game and needed help with a quest. The requested aid was rendered and before disbanding an offer of future help was made for the next night. This had happened before but when called upon the gesture proved hollow, the assistance and myself quickly forgotten. To this new offer I responded, “people always say this but then they don’t really mean it.” The nightelf was taken aback both by my directness and the truth of my words-- this was indeed usually the case. Deciding to prove he meant what he said the next night, I was petitioned right away to form a group again. And again the next night, and the next, and the next. That player was Jon. I am struck by my approach to academic team-ups now that again probes for sincerity resonating with my approach then.

As we learn, change, and move forward in life we sometimes feel so utterly transformed that we bear no resemblance to our past self. When we pause to reflect, we just might see the shards of who we would become were there all along. As I progress in the fellowship, pieces from my past are surfacing and falling into place in my current configuration.

Thursday, I visited the High Art Museum with my friend, Jackie, another Brit, to tour the brand new exhibit, The Lost World of Minnie Evans, where we wandered the twisting arabesque forests of Evans’ mandalas and spiritual bestiaries. Many of the intricate forms populated by winged elephants, griffins, horses, and angels on display were inspired by the Book of Revelations and the lush gardens of Airlie, where Evans worked as gatekeeper to the Edenic space. Years spent collecting visitor tickets and walking in the garden fused into the densely colored floral patterns of her tableaus. Beatific eyes, noses, and mouths of deities peek out from the symmetrical vines of the artist’s divinely inspired lost worlds.

A mandala is a representation of the universe that serves as a receptacle for divinity in which universal forces coalesce. One mentally enters the mandala, tracing the intricate lines that proceed toward its centre. This journey of the eye is an analogy for the cosmic process of disintegration and reintegration. A hypnotic centrifugal force is at work in the design. I scan a muted gold, green, and fuchsia form, winding my way to the core, and then, with a noticeable tug, pull my gaze away to pass on to the next scalloped form.

Later that evening, at the TechPoetry reading, Marie Howe describes the same energy in her poem “The Singularity” that recalls the still “compact” unexpanded universe, a “tiny tiny dot brimming with is is is is is” that rests at the mandala centre; each visit is a return to singularity before lancing back out into galactic expansion. The journey begins in her poem “Hymn”

as an almost inaudible hum,

low and long for the solar winds

and far dim galaxies,

. . .

…breaking into

harmonies we’d not known possible. finding the chords as we

found our true place singing in a million

million keys the human hymn of praise for every

something else there is and ever was and will be:

the song growing louder and rising,

-Marie Howe, “Hymn”

Curving mandalas and winged creatures hover over the page as I scan “Hymn,” the first poem I happen upon, cracking open the newly purchased collection of Howe poems when I get home. The inaudible hum growing to crescendo pulses within mandala veins—the grace of symmetry binding incomprehensible force. The gradually increasing hum flows through the mandalas and devotional gardens of Evans, bursting into paisleys, marigolds, and primroses. I begin to hum too as I settle into a round of pre-bed yoga. Kneeling on my mat, I see faces I hadn’t noticed before peering out from the black leaf and fleur-de-lis blooming over the tan padding. Pushing backward and arching forward, I am a mandala moving toward my centre.

In a rhetorical gesture well-suited to a symposium on close-reading every round of talks was followed by an equally long round of Q&A. The ample time facilitated a robust exchange that made audience contribution, a close reading of the talks, as important os the initial presentation, tilling the field of the room with ideas likely to ripen into course activities, lectures, and scholarly essays. Below are a few highlights that caught my attention.

Close reading as studying

Reading can produce intense sensations and emotions. Fascination arising from our response often leads us to re-read and look more closely to analyze and thus understand how and why the text does this to us. The shift from experiencing to analyzing marks the transition into close reading, which, ironically, increases the distance between the reader and the text. Becci Carver’s analogy viscerally captured the shift as talking about really good sex after it’s happened. There will always be a gap between the language of analysis and experience. Yet, paradoxically, claims to objective epistemology are patently false. Aesthetic are innately embodied and thus a personal sense of self that includes feelings, preference, desires, personality, is always present in our thinking and systems of knowledge.

The attempt to close read a text can be difficult. Joshua Kotin’s talk focused on the struggle, describing close reading as a form of knowledge deferred, coming, but not yet here. Rather than accomplished the very first try, close reading may take numerous attempts and may sometime fail. This is part of the philosophy of skepticism that ponders if anyone can ever really be understood.

Teaching close reading

Most interesting and most useful to me were techniques discussed for teaching close reading to students.

The word “attention” followed by “remembrance” were displayed on the screen for about 30 seconds each during Jeff Dolven’s presentation on the phenomenology of close reading. Instructed to close read these two words, the audience was susequently asked to call out a few observations. The potentially excruciatingly scaleable activity (1 5 minutes? 60 minutes? more?) demonstrated the relationship of change to focus. Dolven explained, “attention is not possible if an object does not change.” This activity was followed by a dense excerpt of poetry taking turns reading and being observed reading, ultimately demonstrating the body’s close-reading behaviors of leaning in and periodic flicking back of the eyes to re-read. Close-reading is ingrained in how we read.

Taking the audience through a brief survey of texting the phrase “ok” with its myriad permutations and punctuation options (ok, ok!, ok. ok…, kk, okurr, o.k., okay, 👍,👌, ❤️,💝,❤️‍🔥,💗,💘 and more), Chris Spaide demonstrated close reading as observation of the subtle act of selection, which permeates everday rhetorical existence. The simple act of selecting an agreement provides an accessible gateway to usher students into the practice of close reading.

Close reading was examined, by Lindsay Rockson, as a method for finding another way to live together. Studying the act of noticing occurring in texts by Fred Morten and bell hooks, Rockson explained how meticulous critique of close reading participates in the pedagogy of transgression that questions the status quo. The act of close reading simultaneously divides us and brings us together through altered understanding.

Evaluating close readings

Close reading is an act of noticing the choices made in a text to form an argument about the significance of those choices. How do we know if a close reading is a good one? The best close readings, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews attests, are stretchy ones: how far can the close reading argument stretch the text while still being believable and holding together? The stretchiest ones, meaning arguments that stretch the text in a delightful or surprising new take that appears to reveal a truth that was there all along, twang the bands of credulity but don’t surpass the breaking point.

Pointing out the details

Taking a literal and metaphorical stance, Brian Glavey explained the finger that close reading points at the text both notices and covers up details with tip of the scanning digit. Close reading can both reveal and obscure details.

Oren Izenberg scans for texture to evaluate close reading identifying a particular balance of elements—concepts, linguistics, terminology, history, definitions, support, references, that are present in effective close readings that demonstrates evidence of having grasped how the poem, story, prose was made. Izenberg suggested that even in cases where reader might not fully parse everything present, there is a particular vibe to a quality close reading that is intuitive. A useful analogy might be a good close reading is like glass of good wine offering a subtle blend of flavors, patterns, rhythms, to the discerning sipper, that offers a balanced whole delivering what is or can be known about a particular text.

From compelling definitions, approaches to teaching it, and evaluating it, the symposium, and its book, reinvigorate a timeless academic classic that will have me close reading my close readings for a long while.

The glen around the ramshackle red house tucked into the woods had been transformed into a webbed graveyard populated by the glowing eyes of zombies, skeletons and witches. The wooden bridge traversing the pond was now interrupted by the gaping maw of Jaws. The dirt road driveway was flanked by enormous skeletal guardians bidding ominous welcome to approaching visitors curious to visit the assortment of cackling ghouls and monsters.

Visitors waiting for their turn on the hayride sipped blood-bag Koolaids and toasted s’mores while warming up at the nearby fire pit, listening to Halloween hits “Ghostbusters” and “Monster Mash” piping out of nearby radio. My mom, volunteering as greeter and refreshment host, playfully warns the trick-or-treaters to hold on tight on the hayride to avoid getting eaten, adding they only eat the smallest ones. Seeing their eyes widen, I teasingly add, “their best strategy is to always sit next to a smaller kid.” An older sister promptly grabs the shoulders of her younger brother.

The hayride starts out slowly, moving forward into the gloomy path. We watch the dance of the Oogie Boogie from Berton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, Jack Skelington presiding on the rooftop above. Next, we file past a trio of stacked Pygmy zombies and squeeze past the snapping teeth of a dragon. A grinning set of bones on the right beckons us onward.

As we file past a row of tombstones, some of the terrors come alive. A witch on the left grins and waves. An evil clown chases after the ride, banging the back grate of the trailer with a bat and passengers scream in delighted terror. Another clown brandishes a chain-saw, revving his equipment menacingly. A blur of red-hair psycho yells and rushes past the hayride. A blood-smeared little girl approaches and timidly asks “do you know what happened to my parents?,” before shrieking. Startled passengers jump and glance left and right. Knowing to expect the unexpected, everyone is on high alert.

As we creep into a dark wood, long strings tied to tree branches, invisible in the dark, tickle passengers raising goosebumps. Suddenly, the driver (my sister) yells out, “hold on!,” and the hayride speeds into a tummy-turning dip into a gully—squeals and laughter echo on the night air—and then the driver banks right, skipping the exit gate, making a wide turn through a field and then back into the woods and down the hill, once more into the dip and then heads out the gate. Chuckling parents lift their kids out of bundles of hay. Many of them want to go for another ride. More than one grinning passenger tells us as they leave that this is what Halloween is supposed to be about.

Rather than driving back to Atlanta, I stay the night at my mom’s house. The morning sounds of the big city are replaced by my mom puttering in the kitchen and the clucking of the chickens in backyard coop, punctuated by more than one roster crowing. After breakfast and coffee, we head back over to my sister’s house. The skeletons and zombies are still on patrol looking bewildered in the daylight. We chat about the night before and make up a batch of caramel apples.

Writer-Based Prose

Melissa Ianetta explained to us that writer-based prose is personal writing that follows a writer’s perspective to meet the writer’s needs. For this reason, writer-based prose may fail to convey meaning to those reading it because a writer needs little elaboration to follow their own thoughts. If you are writing for yourself you are working out ideas for your own understanding and you may not be thinking about what somebody else needs to understand.

Reader-based Prose

Linda Flower defines reader-base prose as “a deliberate attempt to communicate something to a reader. To do that it creates a shared language and shared context between writer and reader.”

When engaging in reader-based prose the writer aims to meet the reader halfway and demonstrate engagement with the reader’s perspective, and priorities.

Writing for Your Academic Reader

While also a highly educated academic, many readers on the job search committee will not be specialists in your particular area of expertise, so you want to write about your dissertation in a way that someone in your field and someone not in your field can easily understand. This also means clearly explaining the significance of your achievements in your field. If you talk about an award explain why it matters. Your goal is to show the trajectory of your career and how your publications fit into it.

Your reader is also, like you, really busy, has probably read twenty letters before your letter, is reading on a Saturday while making breakfast, preventing a toddler from eating crayons, and getting hustled by a dog for biscuits, all at once. They are, in a word, distracted. You want to make their reading job as easy as possible.

Stylish Persuasion

Your prose should avoid overly complex sentence structures and should be carefully organized to guide your reader’s progress through the letter. Just as we’re always telling our students, use active verbs instead of passive for stronger writing. Avoid excessive use of “I” and “me” and “mine.” Bring in “we” and “our” and “us” when you can. Don’t futz with the formatting i.e. smaller font, weird margins. And definitely don’t go over two pages.

Avoid whimsical wordsmithery. This is not the time to demonstrate the range of your vocabulary by trotting out “verily,” “yore,” “spatchcocked,” or “spanghew.” You don’t want to annoy your future colleagues before you even get there. Nobody wants to be in faculty meetings with that person for thirty years.

The Introduction

The introduction should be short and include a tripartite thesis statement that makes a clear claim as to why you are good match for the position. This claim should directly incorporate language from the job ad description. If the job ad says they are looking for someone to teach narratology, adaptation, and community-based learning, all three of those items better be in your claim. And then the next three body paragraphs of the letter should back up each point of the claim with evidence from your teaching experience and research.

Stay On Target

You want to gear your content towards the specific type of school you are applying to.

• 4-4 R1 in your specialty: Talk about your research first.

• Liberal arts college (SLAC): Still talk about your research first but make sure you get to teaching on page 1.

• Instructor job: It is all about your teaching with a bit about how your life as a writer connects to the work in the next-to-last paragraph.

Teaching Stuff

Teaching stuff to talk about includes the range of classes you have taught and teaching related experience beyond the classroom. Projects and work of note with your students. You want to provide evidence of your ability to connect with a range of students. You should also discuss efforts and activities that you have engaged in that go beyond the ordinary teaching experience: You want to show that your interest in teaching, as Melissa Ianetta says, goes beyond “will teach for food.”

The “Boutique Moment”

The “Boutique” teaching moment is Melissa’s term for something extra special that you do in your teaching that sets what happens in your classroom apart from others- a course highlight that makes you distinct as an instructor. This may be something that took you some time to put together and refine, one again showing commitment to teaching goes deeper than making a living.

Lots of Pretty Trees but No Clear Forest

You want to avoid listing out things you do in the classroom. A laundry list of activities is boring and confusing. What do these activities teach students? How do they fit into your pedagogy, experience, and goals as an instructor? The goal is to convey a clear sense of who you are in the classroom and then carefully use teaching activities to support that claim. Likewise, you don’t want to just list out things you’ve done, conferences and workshops you’ve attended. Your letter is a conversation with your reader not a narration of your CV.

Make a Quick Exit

When you’re done, make a quick, polite exit. The reader has already made up their mind and hopefully your letter did the work it needed to do. So, no lingering final high note. Don’t try any “Jedi mind tricks,” as Melissa calls them (“I look forward to hearing from you”). And don’t bring in any new information. Just point out how you’re a good match one last time and would like to discuss how you can further contribute to University X.

The cover letter is actually not about making sure employers know about all the skills you have. It is a persuasive letter in which you demonstrate your investment in the position, the department, the school mission, and how you fulfill the role for which you are applying.

Some of this advice sounds pretty obvious and straightforward. It is kind of ironic that a bunch of Ph.Ds who teach others how to write seem to suddenly forget everything they know when it comes to writing their own cover letter. We have to connect our teacher brain to our job candidate brain.

Yesterday’s pedagogy seminar focused on reasons why we assign writing and considering that in the context creating effective assignment prompts. My cohort of Britts came up with a great list of reasons for giving students writing tasks. These were a few of my favorites:

• Unlocking a sense of how you see the world

• Helping readers see the world/the text as you see it

• Practicing and advancing skills like organization

• To prepare for discussion and make cold calling (getting called on during class discussions) feel less mean

• To put themselves in the shoes of another group of people (audience awareness).

There are so many good reasons to get students writing, which leads us to the next requirement, crafting quality writing assignments that delivers opportunities for students to experience these writing benefits and gain these skills.

Elements of an Effective Writing Assignment

Great writing assignments are less about quantity and more about the quality of the task and the quality of that task depends a lot on developing a strong, clear assignment prompt. And, ideally, fit the prompt onto just one page. Headings and subheadings and what not are great but the reality is the longer it is the bigger the cognitive load. One way to keep it short is to discuss related essential information in the lecture about or create a supplemental considerations page in Canvas. Scaffolded steps can be listed in the prompt and expanded in greater detail on a lower-stakes assignment for that project step.

Elements of an effective Writing Assignment to consider include:

• Interactive components - There should be opportunities to explore writing at multiple stages of the project. Will those stages be solitary, paired, group focused.

• Meaning-constructed task - The assignment should be a task connects allows them to formulate their own thoughts. This can also be an opportunity to integrate student interest into the assignment. In order for student to have a real opportunity to form new meaning it is usually best to avoid over-done topics like the death penalty, abortion, etc. about which it will be difficult to find something new to say as others have written about those ideas extensively.

• Clear standards - transparent, explicit guidelines that define what successful work looks like.

• Role or purpose - The reason for doing the assignment should be explained. Why are you doing it and what should students get out of it.

• Specified audience who has an identified need - Who is the target audience of the assignment? What audience need is being met? The assignments should point students in a specific direction to give them rationale for shaping their rhetoric.

• Clear genre and discourse community - Genre and discourse community are intricately connected, as genres are the conventionalized communicative events—like a lab report or research paper—that a discourse community uses to achieve its common goals. Genres belong to a community, and their specific forms are created and maintained by its members to communicate effectively within that group. Conversely, a discourse community is defined by its shared goals, specialized language, and the genres it uses to communicate.

• Evaluation explanation - Or in other words, why you are going to grade it? Grading provides feedback to students, measures their learning against objectives, and informs instructors about the effectiveness of their teaching. It also serves as a form of communication about a student’s academic progress to various audiences, like admissions committees or future employers, and helps set future learning goals.

• A clear unified task statement - Clearly and directly explain the task you are asking students to complete. This item seems the most straight forward yet it is one that many prompts get wrong. A common pitfall in task statements is to explain that task by giving students LOTS of questions to guide them towards what they might think and write about. Lots of questions is confusing not inspirational. Questions after question after question becomes overwhelming.

Student Interaction with the Assignment Prompt

The following are a few easy ways to get students interacting right away with a new writing prompt that you have just given them. This can also function as an early warning system to let you know if there is an issue with the prompt that needs to be clarified.

• Make them come up with a question about it as an exit card.

• Have them discuss their approach with 1 or 2 classmates.

• Have them start working on it in class. Optional: have them turn in a brainstorm about it (free write, mind map).

Prompt Reflection

The next time I craft a writing assignment prompt I am going to spend some time reflecting on it. What is working well? Where are opportunities to improve?

• Is it a meaning constructing task?

• What is the purpose?

• Have I specified the audience?

• Is the genre and community clear?

• Is the task clearly outlined and unified?

I really can’t complain too much. Texting and nightly face time calls definitely have made long distance a lot more bearable. It was not so very long ago when those traveling across the country or abroad for work maintained the tenuous link of family connection through letters few and far between. Still further back, Ovid tells of an unusual letter inscribed upon an apple delivered to the sea nymph, Cydippe. (A fruit-favorite of our household, that would be a tasty although challenging method of conveying messages.) By the communication standards of the past 10,000 years or so, the video phone call innovations of the past couple of decades are a miraculous upgrade.

But letters, texts, and video are still no substitute for the real thing. As Vita Sackville-West so eloquently puts it in her letter to Virginia Woolf, when too long apart I am “reduced to a thing that wants… I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.” The “quite simple” pain of separation pours out in the first airport hug. Getting in the car, in the midst of the frenzied pup excitement, my youngest beagle, Kira, pours out as well glomming onto my lap, renewing her claim upon my presence.

The next morning, the routine of home takes possession of me and it feels like I never left. Atlanta and the Brittain Fellowship are far away, like a different life that I had in a dream. Ordinary activities—grocery shopping, walking the dogs, showering, watching television—have an incantatory effect, except I find myself lingering over and savoring each moment a bit more than before. Drinking our morning coffee in familiar mugs pings the small bell of my soul. Favorite meals are cooked, wine sipped, and presence absorbed with an intensity that wants to store excess for later, all the while knowing that that is not possible.

On my night flight heading back to Atlanta, I dream of home as I prepare to wake up and teach my classes at Georgia Tech in the morning.

Pre & Post Observation Meetings

We had a pre observation meeting to discuss the lesson plan for that day so that the observer would know what to expect and followed up with a debrief to discuss how things went in our classrooms. Despite being observed by the nicest person imaginable I felt nervous all the same. My observation partner expressed similar sentiments. There is just something about being watched that triggers psychological anxiety.

I genuinely enjoyed watching my fellow Britt teach her class. The class highlight was a group activity using a Venn diagram on the whiteboard comparing and contrasting the differences of an Op-Ed to a letter to the editor responding to an Op-Ed. My observer expressed similar enjoyment in the visual annotation activity in my class which involved drawing a car window with figures and labels to represent the various selves in Virginia Woolf’s short story “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motorcar” (1942); this activity was aimed at understanding the plurality of identity to help my students think about the various facets that make up identity and prepare them to design avatars for their next project. She paid me perhaps the greatest compliment I could hope to receive of informing me I did a great job of explaining Woolf to my class.

Post Observation Reflection

Our observations concluded we shared a cup of blueberry sage tea in my office and reflected on our experience. In the end we both decided that we were better off for having had the opportunity to talk about our teaching with another colleague as well as having someone else see what we’re doing with the ability to testify to the success of the learning environment we create for our students. Both of us are keen to get more comfortable being observed and expressed a willingness to be invited into one another’s classes more often.

Why you WANT someone to come and observe your class

Typically, when a peer attends your class to observe they will give you a private written reflection discussing their experience that does not have to be shared; however, if they have positive comments in their reflection you might want to. You can request permission to use their note in your teaching portfolio and job materials. Observation can seem really scary but there is no better or more sympathetic observer than a peer who both appreciates and understands what you are doing who can help you improve and confirm to the outside world that you actually do know what you’re doing.

Professional Gardens

The Curriculum Vita or CV, is the botanical garden to the vegetable patch of the resumé, and it tends to get a bit wild and thorny as a document as professional accomplishments, publications, conference activities, and courses taught are hastily added in over the years. Mine had become quite the professional briar patch in desperate need of landscaping and trimming of the hedges. How to categorize and position the various shrubs in my garden was a dilemma I had been contending with for some time. Melissa’s advice helped me, in a word, unbury my talent.

Tilling new ground & relabeling the plants

The breadth of my teaching experience was being choked out by the various departments and places where I have taught becoming a mere list of course numbers nested beneath the names of institutions. I transplanted the courses taught to a new patch of CV ground titled, “Teaching Experience” and each class was allowed to add a couple of blooms detailing course theme and major course projects. Meanwhile, institutions where I have taught became a concise list of “Academic Appointments” with key duties performed such as course load per semester, types of classes, and service work.

Next my publication section was renamed “Research” and reorganized into neatly trimmed categories: “Peer Reviewed,” “Invited,” “Under Review,” “In Preparation,” “Scholarly Presentations,” and “Other Publications.” The new categorization system provided more capacious rows has room for growth and allows all my various publication work from peer reviewed articles, conference presentations, art exhibition work, and freelance art writing, to shine more brightly.

Pulling out the weeds

Other categories such as “Research Interests” and “Relevant Course Work” were pulled out entirely. It should already be abundantly clear what my expertise is from the research section so there was no need to belabor the CV with additional fields of material of redundant or dubious value. The “References” section was also removed it is something that should be provided upon request. These deletions gave the remaining sections still more white space to breathe, allowing for strategic line breaks to partition “Professional Skills” into concise, tasteful chunks.

Finally, a thorough pruning of duplicate dates, replacing superfluous phrases with bullet points, uncovering the full names of position titles, checking for consistent formatting and fonts, cleared away the rest of the brambles obscuring content.

My CV feels lighter, leaner, and cleaner than it has in a long while. You can be the most interesting candidate in the world but, if that information is hidden beneath the tangled overgrowth of your professional existence no one will get past the garden entrance to see the full scope of what is there.

I could have just told my students about the tutoring center, which, of course, I did, and stopped there. I also could have requested a representative be sent to my classroom to talk to them about the center. But, there is something about physically going to a place that has the power to resonate more deeply.

Reasons For an In-Person Field Trip to The Writing Center

The first two options are what most instructors go with and it is completely understandable: Giving up half a class period of precious instruction time in which to impart the skills and knowledge that students need to succeed in the class is asking a lot. My rationale is that it is impossible in two 75 minute session a week to give my students everything they will need. But if they know about and go to the writing center, they will be able to get help with whatever they need that they didn’t get or missed during our class period. And, there is just something about literally walking our legs over there, touring the space, hearing the guide explain the services that makes a bigger impact. Having walked there once they are more likely to do so again. And, as we want more students to use the writing center this is a big deal.

The NWCC at Georgia Tech, and indeed writing centers at all university campuses, tend to be under utilized. Reasons for this are one, students are SUPER busy, and two, they tend to see writing centers as remedial—punishment for being bad writers. Something our guide (thanks to my fellow Britt, Michael Young!), myself, and others are doing to address this PR issue is to stop referring to the writing center as a place where sucky writers get help. Yes, it can help those struggling, but what is important to normalize is that ALL writers need help.

Expert writers know that they need help. Graduate students, doctoral students, postdocs, professors, and advanced scholars all get others to look at their writing and provide feedback. The NWCC serves writers of all skill levels from novice to professional. So, no matter what skill level you are at you are never done with visiting the writing center. While virtual and asynchronous appointments are options, nothing beats an in-person, one-on-one conversation with a trained consultant to push that essay, resume, script, or book chapter to the next level.

Ruminating on Photos and Field Trips

The exhibit I walked through was called Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing. As I admired the amoeba-blue of Sheila Pinkel’s x-rayed plant life in her untitled “Lightworks” series (1977-1983) and the gray-scale apple-cosmos of Kenji Nakahashi’s “New York City,” (1964), my mind flashed forward to the class I’m designing for spring semester themed around the thin line separating boredom and creativity. Ordinary field thistles and an apple, things generally not worth a second glance, are transformed by the lens into ghostly floral skeletons and a speckled universe with stem-turned-vortex primed to suck space in—I began to plot a class field trip to the High. I could’ve perused much of the High’s offerings from my computer at home, but there is just something about going there and looking at the art in person.