Jessicaquick.files.wordpress.com



Rather than view students as passive recipients of knowledge, I help students actively pursue their own motivations for writing to enhance their interaction with our shared world. Accordingly, I pose recurring questions across all of my literature and creative writing courses: How do we define literature? Poetry? How do we draw them into our day-to-day experiences, and vice versa? With these questions in mind, I take a three-part pedagogical approach to course design that offers students: 1) opportunities for inventive learning through “low-stakes” writing, 2) self-reflective exercises for cultivating written and verbal projects as process-oriented, and 3) methodologies for critical thinking and understanding how literature translates to everyday experiences. These methods allow me to cultivate an inclusive classroom that rewards critical attention, mindful risk, and self-reflective patience as key skills for both creative and analytical writing. As a student comment from my Stephen Horne Teaching Award Nomination reads: “Jessica Stark is an incredible teacher—she is open to considering different angles to approach a piece, gives helpful, constructive feedback, and has encouraged me to search beyond my comfort zone in my writing to make it better.” While I take joy in meticulously planning my courses, I also prioritize a holistic, compassionate approach to each and every one of my students and structure discursive assessment throughout the term to ensure that their expectations and needs are being continually met. Across my courses, I encourage students to take interpretive risks that challenge their abilities to spontaneously write. For example, in an introductory creative writing course on Poetry, Fiction, and the Hybrid Form, I adapted an exercise by poet Bernadette Mayer and used comics pages for an exercise in “mistranslation.” Students filled in a sheet of comics with the text in speech bubbles omitted, as if they were writing a complete poem for their assigned page. This timed activity allows students to perform “low-stakes” writing (they are not required to share their results), while challenging their preconceived definitions of poetic forms. Students also develop their attention to materials of the everyday—not just comics, but also advertisements, text messages, and social media—as potentially limitless prompts for their own creative (re)interpretations. After discussing how their placement of words interacts with visual media, we turned to excerpts of Joe Brainard’s C Comics and Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and students analyzed how poets have often reinvented visual popular culture in relation to poetry. Taking risks and paying mindful attention to everyday materials, students leave class with a more capacious understanding of how to construct and involve literature in their daily lives.In order to teach writing as process-oriented, I structure peer workshop sessions leading up to the submission of written projects. Supporting in-class peer review with supplementary online course websites, such as the collaborative Tumblr page I used in my class on the Micro Form, enables students to participate in discussion as mindful writers, readers, and editors. Digital, interactive assignments prior to class sessions allow students to engage more fully in the multiple processes involved with writing and editing. In my classes, students use digital platforms to interact with each other leading up to workshops—posting questions about their classmates’ writing and responding to questions about their own work online. With these steps in place, students are better prepared for collaboration as they have already been evaluating work prior to class. Structuring peer review organizes writing as a communicative process—not a gift delivered from the Muse, but a developed skill that, like learning a new language, requires patient reflection and an open mind to the challenging task of honing one’s own work with new perspective.To foster different learning styles and interests, I host a number of mixed media exercises in my courses that encourage students’ interdisciplinary exploration. In my “Poetry and Pop Music” course, an English seminar designed for non-majors, students worked in groups to analyze a poem from M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong! sequence on the Middle Passage. Students then individually researched archival materials using the Slave Voyages Digital Database, noting how Philip’s poems work in contrast to conventional histories of the slave trade. As a class, we discussed how Philip’s poetry addresses (or questions) their research. Students then explored the implications of the poem in relation to selections of hip hop music from the syllabus, which pushed students to contemplate how these cross-disciplinary themes manifest in current popular culture. As a result of this exercise, several students used their research to develop final projects, which put Philip’s poetry in conversation with a number of other fields, including political science, history, sociology, and economics. Foregrounding multiple opportunities for students to think about literature in context with their own interests, I scaffold this analytic exercise so students can approach critical thinking as a daily practice and witness how “the literary”—its poetry and its lessons—holds relevance to their everyday lives. In order to promote clear communication with my students, I structure mid-term, one-on-one conferences (or small group meetings for larger classes) to discuss the course, previous assignments, and ideas for final projects. These sessions provide a valuable opportunity to address specific needs and to modify course objectives based on students’ feedback. To evaluate students’ grasp of the course materials, students also fill out anonymous, online surveys with two basic questions prior to these scheduled conferences: What is helping you learn in the class? What is making learning difficult? This mid-term questionnaire allows students to reflect on their learning progress at a crucial moment of the semester, while giving me important information that I use to reassess the assignments, pacing, and content for the remainder of the term. Fostering an adaptable pedagogy, I prioritize assessment at multiple points during the semester to reflect on and modify my teaching approach based on the diverse motivations and abilities of each class and its students. My goal as a teacher is to invite my students to play with what’s familiar: their preconceived notions of poetry, their ideas about the world, and themselves. A faculty nomination from my Duke University’s Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2019) reads: “Pedagogy for her involves challenging students’ assumptions about writing, literature, popular culture, and the world generally.” From linking poetry to daily life, to analyzing social media as a literary tool, I teach in order to impart an invaluable means for my students to thrive as learners and creators in this world: to remain attentive and alive. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download