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First week's #popcornpoem #vizpoem

First week’s #popcornpoem #vizpoem

What follows is a collaborative poem written by my ENGL 215 students in Summer 2020, as a response to this prompt:

Week 1 activity: Compose a free verse poem about the experience of taking an online class. Make sure your post goes into the #popcornpoemschannel, that it doesn’t extend longer than one line of text, and that it makes sense coming after the last person who wrote a line of the group…

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"Kissing in Vietnamese" illustrated #vizpoem

“Kissing in Vietnamese” illustrated #vizpoem

Note: I’m writing this at the airport, so I will edit later with a soundcloud file. Here is the original poem.

Ocean Vuong will be thirty this year (2018), which is revolting but probably not his fault (I’m 41 as I write this). While I would generally say, axiomatically, that the more we know about a subject, the better and more comprehensively we can understand it, this poem challenges its…

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Week 1 #popcornpoems #vizpoem

Week 1 #popcornpoems #vizpoem

https://twitter.com/jason_coats/status/999661565006766081

https://twitter.com/MedinaVizPoem/status/999846665589837829

https://twitter.com/MoldowanShannon/status/999763965923250176

https://twitter.com/vcuCarahCersley/status/999829820895883265

https://twitter.com/SchmickaMartin/status/1000010703628062722

https://twitter.com/vcu_JessWinkler/status/1000041566722027522

https://twitter.com/DianaCh60986…

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Framing DHL

This may be an ill-advised post, since I’m on Sudafed. Lawrence had an astonishingly prolific, if short-lived, career. He’s the equivalent of a first-generation student in today’s parlance: his father was a semiliterate collier, and there’s a good reason his depictions of provincial working-class life ring true. Boasting only a two-year stint at UC Nottingham for a teaching certificate for…

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Example: “The Heavenly City” #vizpoem This week my Visual Poetry class is sussing out what exactly makes a poem a poem. I have a fuller print explanation in…

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Exploring research interstices

In a previous post I discussed the bidirectional capacity of telescopic text to help students gain deep ownership over complex ideas. I continue to like the app, and to believe there are plenty of ways of using it that might be beyond its original intention for pedagogical purposes. I’m not as convinced anymore that its usefulness derives from visualizing logic trees, and it’s not even the most…

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Exploring Analogy and Applicability

Exploring Analogy and Applicability

For this experiment, my objective was to demonstrate how useful prominent ideas and theoretical ways of thinking about data could be. The most important point was “portability” — that knowledge gained in one context, even if acquired through the empirical study of a very specific data set, can be extracted, made abstract, and then reapplied to a similar context with its own quirky data. So…

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Incubating with Telescopic Texts

Incubating with Telescopic Texts

This semester I am experimenting with, on the one hand, drastically reducing the number of different apps I use in the classroom (both F2F and online), and on the other, finding as many ways as possible to exploit the affordances of the technology. I will not of course be the first person to write about using telescopic texts in the classroom; Enoch Hale was the person who first introduced me to…

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On Social Capital #thoughtvectors

On Social Capital #thoughtvectors

This week my UNIV200 students are studying a typical scholarly source, Erich Sommerfeldt’s “The civility of social capital: Public relations in the public sphere, civil society, and democracy.” I like this source not only because it betrays all the hallmarks of a densely-written peer-reviewed journal article (superdense abstract, keywords, fancypants diction, long reference list) but also because…

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In which I talk about some Billy Joel songs for #vizpoem

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In which I talk about some Billy Joel songs for #vizpoem

In which I talk about some Billy Joel songs for #vizpoem

My daughter (7) has unexpectedly developed a love of the Billy Joel of Storm Front (1989), which though good in its way is surely not his best work. Anyway, in talking with her about the singer and what he’s all about in that album (as opposed to the Joel of Piano Man (1973)or The Stranger (1977) or even the retro Innocent Man (1983), it occurred to me that I could use this as an object lesson in…

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Observing Prufrock

Today presents a great opportunity to recap a cultural trend that intersects with the course’s aesthetic interests. You’ll remember from our discussions of “degeneration” that the notion of cultural decay was used often by the British middle class to typify whatever deviated from the norm – whether that was the hooligan, the dandy, the Irish (or any other colonial), or the poet. In particular,…

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Spreading the News #VCUBritMod

Spreading the News #VCUBritMod

My ENGL 340 students are writing a take-home midterm this week, for which I’ve given them three sample passages and asked for interpretive responses relating the passage to the course themes and to the work as a whole, all in 1000 words or less. I’ve been asked for an example response, and decided this is a reasonable request. So, imagine I had just posted the following passage from Lady…

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Hub and Spokes

This configuration is the same as one I arranged earlier in the term but then neglected to photograph. There are four circular seating areas for student group work, with myself in the middle. I started off seated on a torus cushion in the middle, and then later on I wheeled a whiteboard into that central space to make my personal points. Ok, actually there were three circular tables and then a…

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Table Reading Scholarly Sources

Table Reading Scholarly Sources

There are at least four screens controllable by the front A/V stand in the Incubator room; two digital ones at the nominal “front” of the room, and two projector screens on the wall opposite. I haven’t figured out how to use or what to do with the large TV in the back-right corner, beyond making it difficult for students to hide behind its bulk. My goal here was to arrange the room rectangularly,…

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Prospective Process Narratives 2/23/16

Prospective Process Narratives 2/23/16

In order to challenge my UNIV 200 students to expand their research horizons, I’m going to have them create two narratives. The first (2/23) has already happened, as they were developing a preliminary research question to answer. Before this research unit, I assigned a “critical analysis” close reading paper, and the subsequent question to research grew out of their original topic and specific…

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Beginning to incubate

This term (Spring 2016) I have the pleasure of teaching in MCALC 4110, the incubator classroom. If you follow the link, you’ll see that upon walking into the room, one is faced with a seemingly endless array of high-tech and old-school teaching apparatuses. There are whiteboards encircling the entire room, for example; there are also HDMI hookups in a surprisingly large number of places,…