English Studies Online

Description

English Studies Online: Programs, Practices, Possibilities represents a collection of essays by established teacher-scholars across English Studies who offer critical commentary on how they have worked to create and sustain high-impact online programs (majors, minors, certificates) and courses in the field. Ultimately, these chapters explore the programs and classroom practices that can help faculty across English Studies to think carefully and critically about the changes that online education affords us, the rich possibilities such courses and programs bring, and some potential problems they can introduce into our department and college ecologies. By highlighting both innovative pedagogies and hybrid methods, the authors in our collection demonstrate how we might engage these changes more productively.

Divided into three interrelated conversations — practices, programs, and possibilities — the essays in this collection demonstrate some of the innovative pedagogical work going on in English departments around the United States in order to highlight how both hybrid and fully online programs in English Studies can help us to more meaningfully and purposefully enact the values of a liberal arts education. This collection serves as both a cautionary history of teaching practices and programs that have developed in English Studies and a space to support faculty and administrators in making the case for why and how humanities disciplines can be important contributors to digital teaching and learning.
Contributors include Joanne Addison, William P. Banks, Lisa Beckelhimer, Dev K. Bose, Elizabeth Burrows, Amy Cicchino, Erin A. Frost, Heidi Skurat Harris, John Havard, Marcela Hebbard, Stephanie Hedge, Ashley J. Holmes, George Jensen, Karen Kuralt, Michele Griegel-McCord, Samantha McNeilly, Lilian Mina, Catrina Mitchum, Janine Morris, Michael Neal, Cynthia Nitz Ris, Rochelle Rodrigo, Cecilia Shelton, Susan Spangler, Katelyn Stark, Eric Sterling, and Richard C. Taylor.

Sujets

• Writting
• Disciplines
• Language Arts

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 19 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781643172644
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

English Studies Online
Programs, Practices, Possibilities
Edited by
William P. Banks and Susan Spangler
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2021 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on File
978-1-64317-261-3 (paperback)
978-1-64317-262-0 (hardcover)
978-1-64317-263-7 (pdf)
978-1-64317-264-4 (epub)
1 2 3 4 5
Book design by David Blakesley.
Cover photo by Thomas Charters on Unsplash.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paperback, hardcover, and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [e-mail].


Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: Moving English Studies Online
William P. Banks and Susan Spangler
I Programs
2 Designing Online Programs for Student Engagement and Community Building: Three Programs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Heidi Skurat Harris, George Jensen, and Karen Kuralt
3 Lessons Learned: Navigating Online Teaching and Learning in English Studies
Michele Griegel-McCord, Cynthia Nitz Ris, and Lisa Beckelhimer
4 Making Pedagogically Responsible Decisions in Online Course Programming
John C. Havard, Lilian W. Mina, and Eric Sterling
5 It Takes a Village to Create Successful Online Composition Courses
Elizabeth Burrows, Samantha McNeilly, and Matthew Kemp
II Practices
6 Teaching “Teaching Technologies in English Studies”: Training a New Generation of Teachers
Stephanie Hedge
7 Virtual Literature Circles: Re-Embodying Discussion in Online Literature Courses
William P. Banks
8 Redesigning Assignment Sheets for Online Teaching: A Case Study in Universal Design and Multimodality
Ashley J. Holmes
9 Experimental Research and Reflective Teaching Practice in Online Writing Instruction
Joanne Addison
10 More Than Replication: Online Pedagogy Informing Face-to-Face Writing Instruction
Michael Neal, Amy Cicchino, and Katelyn Stark
11 A Tale of Two Courses: Class Discussion Issues in English Studies Online
Susan Spangler
III Possibilities
12 It’s on the Syllabus: Notes from a Black Professor Teaching English Studies Online
Cecilia D. Shelton
13 Expanding Instructional Contexts: Why Student Backgrounds Matter to Online Teaching and Learning
Catrina Mitchum, Marcela Hebbard, and Janine Morris
14 Teaching Ethically Online: Using Universal Design for Learning and Predesigned Courses to Increase Accessibility
Dev K. Bose and Rochelle Rodrigo
15 Performing Identities in Cyberspace: Imagining the Online Multicultural Learning Community
Richard C. Taylor
16 Lessons from Journalism: Developing Online Programs for the Public Good
Erin A. Frost
Contributors
Index to the Print Edition


Acknowledgments
O ne of the joys of the edited collection is the opportunity that the editors and contributors have to collaborate with so many talented writers, teachers, and scholars whose expertise and experiences cross different institutional contexts and missions. This collection is no different, and we are grateful first of all to the wonderful contributors who trusted us as editors to understand, respect, and value their work. We hope that the finished versions of each chapter–and the manuscript as a whole–honors the commitments each contributor made to the overall project.
We came to the idea of this collection through our shared passion for teaching in online contexts, a passion that we have maintained through a friendship that began twenty years ago in graduate school. We were each drawn to Illinois State University’s English department in large part because of its focus on English studies at the doctoral level, a recognition that the many disciplines that make up English studies can function to interanimate each other, and through doing so, provide a powerful way of understanding the impact that the humanities can continue to have in our world. What was harder to imagine then was just how much change the still emerging World Wide Web would have on teaching the different disciplines in our field. As English departments continue to redefine themselves, often as a result of external pressures around funding, student credit hour production, and career preparation, online education has emerged as a key vector around which so many of these conversations are happening. As teachers, we often still find ourselves in conversations with colleagues who do not believe that online spaces can be “real” learning spaces, and yet just as often, we hear of colleagues who are doing truly innovative and engaging things in their online classes. We felt it was time to collect some of those voices and to share their experiences building online programs and exploring new ways to teach English studies.
As we sent the resulting manuscript off to be considered for publication, the world began moving into a global lockdown because of COVID-19. By the time we heard from Parlor Press that they were interested in publishing the collection, it was clear that most of us would spend at least a year in our homes, teaching and learning online. For us, this is not an opportunistic collection; we did not rush to publish it because of the pandemic. But this past year has certainly reminded us that effective online instruction doesn’t occur without careful planning and thought, without time and inquiry into high-impact teaching and learning practices. We are grateful that the authors who contributed to this collection showcase how difficult it can be to provide online students with a truly engaging educational experience, and we hope that the stories and examples they provide can be useful to readers as we emerge into “what’s next” after COVID-19.
We are also extremely grateful to David Blakesley and the brilliant staff at Parlor Press for their encouragement and support for English Studies Online . Seeing the COVID-19 pandemic as a tipping point in online education, David embraced the opportunity to publish an entire collection devoted to teaching English studies in fully online and hybrid contexts, and he challenged us to make sure that the chapters we selected for inclusion represented a diverse and engaged set of writers, teaching contexts, and institutions. We are also thankful to Jared Jameson for his excellent work editing and indexing the manuscript, and to Matt Blakesley for creating the EPUB version of our manuscript.
Will
In addition to those mentioned above, I first have to thank my co-editor and closest friend, Susan Spangler, who has been the driving force behind this collection. Susan’s work ethic is unmatched, and whenever my administrator duties began to take over my life, Susan helped to ground me again with the parts of this project that also needed our attention. I am primarily a social/extroverted person, and I’m grateful for any chance to work closely with a collaborator who can help me to focus on the tasks at hand without making me feel bad for being distracted. Likewise, I’m grateful for the support of my department chair, Marianne Montgomery; for wonderful colleagues in the University Writing Program–Nikki Caswell, Kerri Flinchbaugh, Rebecca Johnson, Rachel Winn, and Claudia Sadowski–who support and challenge me in equal measure; for great colleagues who care deeply about teaching and who are always eager to brainstorm and explore new ideas–Michelle Eble, Erin Frost, and Stephanie West-Puckett; and for dear and supportive friends like Shane Ernst and James Coker, who tolerate far more “work talk” at dinner parties and other get togethers than they should have to.
I am particularly grateful to my colleague, friend, co-teacher, and fellow thespian Rick Taylor. Rick has been one of my most constant teaching friends since I joined the faculty of ECU’s English department in 2003, and I knew almost from the first day I met him that we shared a love of teaching and a commitment to students that would make us close. Early in my career, Rick welcomed me as a co-teacher in the London Study Abroad program he had developed, and that experience with a different type of “distance learning” has been one of the most sustaining of my career. But beyond that, Rick took to online teaching with a gusto when he first began to discover it in the early 2000s, and while I may have had more technological know-how under my belt as an online teacher, Rick reminded me that after all the bells and whistles, it is our compassion and care that makes online teaching, just like more traditional campus-based teaching, a meaningful experience for students. Rick remains one of my true pedagogical idols, and his chapter in our collection represents his swan song, his final piece of scholarly writing before retiring in summer 2021. I will miss our regular talks about teaching, books, theater, and family, but I remain grateful that his impact on my teaching, my scholarship, my career, and my life will continue across the miles that will soon separate us.
I remain equally grateful and humbled by the love and support of my family. Throughout the writing and editing process, Jackson provided more hugs and cudd