I’m an old-school literature teacher at heart. There are few things that make me happier than sitting around the Harkness table with my students and getting elbow-deep in a novel. While I am not adverse to technology, when I was first tasked with integrating educational tech in my classroom, it seemed to me to be an awkward fit with my discipline. That is why it came as such a surprise when I discovered how useful our Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) can be.
The VLE is now one of my favorite teaching tools. It has revolutionized the way I teach, expanded the walls of my classroom, and broadened the range of techniques, types of content, and assessments at my disposal. At the same time, it has, paradoxically, allowed me to have more of those meaty, Harkness table discussions of text; by streamlining the way I deliver other aspects of the curriculum, it has made more space for the traditional textual analysis I love.
In this post, I want to share with you a few of the ways that I leverage this tool to enhance my teaching of English. Specifically, I’d like to share how the VLE enables me to more elegantly deliver a broader range of content, flip my classroom, and empower students to create and share content with each other.
Delivering Broader Classroom Content
I have been teaching a feminist literature and theory class called What Women Want for ten years now. As feminism has taken center stage in many digital publications, from blogs like Jezebel, to online posts from The New York Times and The Huffington Post, students and fellow colleagues have begun to send me articles related to feminist issues in the news. I also find that I come across articles, videos, tumblrs, and memes in my own online reading, and I frequently flag items that would be perfect complements to a unit of study in What Women Want. In the past, I would occasionally print one of the articles to share with the class, but an article here or there did not afford my students the same experience I was getting--the mere fact of being inundated with material related to feminism in my own online life meant was I was truly aware of the immediacy of this issue. By contrast, my students weren’t necessarily experiencing feminist issues outside the classroom, and an isolated, printed article did not change that dynamic. Enter the VLE.
I have now developed pages of content related to different topics that complement the guiding questions of our course and nuance our understanding of the main texts. For example, when we read The Color Purple, we focus on intersectional feminism, examining the ways in which factors such as class, race, culture, and sexual orientation shape the experience of being a woman. In the midst of that novel, I ask students to spend a weekend browsing content on a page I’ve developed on the VLE about intersectional feminism:
Students browse the page, reading articles, watching videos, and getting a sense of the different strands of the issue. I am able to deliver tons of content efficiently and elegantly, and the students get a sense of how relevant and widespread this issue is beyond the classroom.
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