Tag Archives: pedagogy

Creative Projects (Unessays) Spring 2024

In my upper-level survey and seminar classes, I assign students a final project with a lot of self-direction. They get to choose whether to work solo or in a small group (2-4 students). They get to choose whether to write a paper, whether to connect the current course to their overall course of study, or whether to do a creative “unessay” project. Finally, they get to choose whether their project will be publicly available or only submitted to me.

Every semester I am impressed by my students’ creativity and their insightful engagement with our course material. This semester posed additional challenges as access to many of the platforms and tools students have used in the past (Twitter, Instagram, etc) are currently restricted inside the Russian Federation. This group of students found new tools and new ways to use familiar tools. 

This semester’s creative projects included original creative work, a comic, a collaborative short story, a choose-your-own adventure game, a Telegram bot that recommends fairy tales, and several websites. 

  1. Here is an original song composed and performed by my student and inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: 
    https://youtu.be/e-VSRQmruG0?si=z3GDmBKupQJVOliO
  2. This Telegram bot recommends fairy tales for you to read. I have enjoyed going through the question tree several times to see what the results were:
    https://t.me/fairyyytales_bot
  3. This program is an interactive game based on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Garden of the Forking Paths.” Once you click on this link, download the file, and then open it in your browser to initiate play:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YeAt95gZ_Bqg3Boakx3MJ0UAZug5eFAA/view?usp=sharing
  4. Explore the 1,001 Nights (The Arabian Nights) in a new way on Instagram: @1001nights.inst
  5. Learn more about Jorge Luis Borges, his influences, his legacy, and his short stories on this website:
    https://2432322.tilda.ws/
  6. Explore the fantastic storyworlds of Hayao Miyazaki’s animation on this website:
    http://fantasyworldsofmiyazaki.tilda.ws/

For those colleagues who may want to include a similar project in their classes, here’s my current prompt for the creative project: 

Develop a webpage, board game, video, piece of art, short story, film, or other creative work related to the content of this course. It may focus on one or a group of texts on the syllabus. Alternatively, the creative project may focus more broadly on the literary or cultural concepts we discuss. You will be required to participate in the drafting and revision process, so your Project Proposal will need to include a plan for what you will submit on the draft deadlines. Method of submission will be specific to the type of project.  You will also write a reflection on the project.

This may be a group project. Maximum group size is 4 students. Groups should include a plan for division of labor in the project proposal.

Past examples of projects in response to this prompt can be found here: Marymount Students 2018-2020, NES Students 2022, NES Students 2023

Your project should be significant and polished. We are giving four weeks of our class time to this, so that is approximately 30 working hours from each student. 

Creative Projects (Unessays) Spring 2023

In my upper-level survey and seminar classes, I assign students a final project with a lot of self-direction. They get to choose whether to work solo or in a small group (2-4 students). They get to choose whether to write a paper, whether to connect the current course to their overall course of study, or whether to do a creative “unessay” project. Finally, they get to choose whether their project will be publicly available or only submitted to me.

Every semester I am impressed by my students’ creativity and their insightful engagement with our course material. This semester posed additional challenges as access to many of the platforms and tools students have used in the past (Twitter, Instagram, etc) are currently restricted inside the Russian Federation. This group of students found new tools and new ways to use familiar tools.

This semester’s creative projects included original creative work, a comic adaptation, a ‘zine, a travelogue, and several websites.

  1. Here is an adaptation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities in the form of travel guide: https://ksmirnova5.wixsite.com/experiment
  2. This ‘zine also presents images inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: https://kami.app/kZb-kJy-uJc-NLQ
  3. This website presents analysis of the Russian book market with a focus on the fantastic genre, broadly construed, and making use of both quantitative and qualitative analytical tools: http://fantasticliterature.tilda.ws/
  4. This website is a comprehensive readers’ guide to Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti: The Complete Trilogy: http://shablonbinti.tilda.ws/
  5. This Prezi offers readers an annotated map to Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti: The Complete Trilogy: https://prezi.com/view/o73L5nO3sc1sDw43uU2Q/
  6. Based on your entertainment preferences, this website offers recommendations of particular episodes of the series Love, Death, & Robots as well as suggestions of places and activities within Moscow : https://datalens.yandex/en3xfjc8ly5k4?tab=7l&state=1194c856115
    Users can also connect with others through the related VK page: https://vk.com/public219965368
  7. This website is an introductory readers’ guide to the Arabian Nights: https://sites.google.com/nes.ru/arabian-nights/home

For those colleagues who may want to include a similar project in their classes, here’s my current prompt for the creative project: 

Develop a webpage, board game, video, piece of art, short story, film, or other creative work related to the content of this course. It may focus on one or a group of texts on the syllabus. Alternatively, the creative project may focus more broadly on the literary or cultural concepts we discuss. You will be required to participate in the drafting and revision process, so your Project Proposal will need to include a plan for what you will submit on the draft deadlines. Method of submission will be specific to the type of project.  You will also write a reflection on the project.

This may be a group project. Maximum group size is 4 students. Groups should include a plan for division of labor in the project proposal.

Past examples of projects in response to this prompt can be found here: Marymount Students 2018-2020, NES Students 2022

Your project should be significant and polished. We are giving four weeks of our class time to this, so that is approximately 30 working hours from each student. 

Creative Projects Spring 2022

In my upper-level survey and seminar classes, I assign students a final project with a lot of self-direction. They get to choose whether to work solo or in a small group (2-4 students). They get to choose whether to write a paper, whether to connect the current course to their overall course of study, or whether to do a creative “unessay” project. Finally, they get to choose whether their project will be publicly available or only submitted to me.

Here’s the current prompt for the creative project:

Develop a webpage, board game, video, piece of art, short story, film, or other creative work related to the content of this course. It may focus on one or a group of texts on the syllabus. Alternatively, the creative project may focus more broadly on the literary or cultural concepts we discuss. You will be required to participate in the drafting and revision process, so your Project Proposal will need to include a plan for what you will submit on the draft deadlines. Method of submission will be specific to the type of project.  You will also write a reflection on the project.

This may be a group project. Maximum group size is 4 students. Groups should include a plan for division of labor in the project proposal.

Here are some past examples of projects in response to this prompt.

Your project should be significant and polished. We are giving four weeks of our class time to this, so that is approximately 30 working hours from each student. 

This semester’s public creative projects are a mix of informational websites, instagram galleries, and interactive Telegram bots. Please visit some of these and offer up some interaction as appropriate for each platform!

Teaching Writing: The Review of the Literature

This post is part of a series on Writing Pedagogy.

The review of the literature, also called a lit review,  is a tricky sub-genre of scholarly writing.  It sometimes shows up as a standalone document in class assignments or in the early stages of the research process. It also shows up as a section of a thesis-driven paper, article,  dissertation, or book.

Continue reading Teaching Writing: The Review of the Literature →

App Review: Perusall

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Perusall is a social reading app than can be used as a standalone tool or embedded with a course management system like Canvas. This is a brief review based on my experience using it with students during our shift to remote instruction in Spring 2020.

Short version: Perusall is useful, but I had some challenges to implementation. Despite these challenges, I will continue to use this app in both remote and face to face instructional modalities.

Continue reading App Review: Perusall →

Teaching Writing: Editing

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This is part of a series of blog posts about guiding students through different stages of the writing process.

This post focuses on editing, the stage of the writing process in which we think about words and sentences. These strategies can be used in conjunction with one another or separately.

If revision is where the magic happens, editing is where we make it sparkle. When the draft has been completed from beginning to end, when it has been revised for coherence, when it has transitions that support the logical flow of ideas, the time arrives to attend to polishing our prose at the word and sentence level. Continue reading Teaching Writing: Editing →

Teaching Writing: Topic Development

This post is part of a series on Writing Pedagogy.

When it comes to choosing topics for research papers, my students, at all levels of writing instruction, fall into two camps. First the Committers–they come to class with a specific topic that they are determined to research. Sometimes these topics are great. Sometimes, however, they are inappropriate to the course or have the wrong scope for the assignment. Then there are the Flailers, who come to class with no idea at all or with a long list of possible ideas, none of which they are willing to commit to.  The series of activities outlined in this post are designed to help both groups of students think carefully about the possibilities available to them in a given assignment, the demands and the limits of the assignment’s scope, and the relationship of their interests to the topics of the course. Continue reading Teaching Writing: Topic Development →

Teaching Writing: Revision and Why We Do It

This post is part of a series on Writing Pedagogy.

This post focuses on revision, the stage of the writing process in which we think about ideas and organization, and also a stage of the writing process that my undergraduate students resist engaging in.

For a long time, I was stymied by my undergraduate students’ resistance toward revising their writing. At first, I thought they were being lazy or failing at time management because they clearly must have known how important revision is!

Continue reading Teaching Writing: Revision and Why We Do It →

Teaching Writing: Revision Strategies

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This post is part of a series on Writing Pedagogy.

This post focuses on revision, the stage of the writing process in which we think about ideas and organization, and also a stage of the writing process that my undergraduate students resist engaging in. (A discussion for another post!)

These strategies can be used in conjunction with one another or separately. Continue reading Teaching Writing: Revision Strategies →