While my area of research emphasis is early modern literature, I have - as I mentioned in chat last week - dabbled in programing beginning in the early days when Atari made desktop computers. I have coded in old 80s BASIC, Pascal and Cobol (circa 1986), and in the 90s I learned a bit of C++, and more recently picked up some HTML and Java Script. As an amateur computer-nerd I've played around with various Linux distros, but have yet to get around to taking up Python. All of that might be impressive except that about half of that knowledge is ad hoc and now quite atrophied from disuse - however much the remnants might percolate up from my sub-conscious from time to time.
Within my research I am interested in early modern political culture, practices of governance, and theories of service within the literature of the period. As someone with a fascination for technology, I am keenly interested in how tech, say the distributed network of the internet, can be deployed as a metaphor for new ways of conceiving of something like early modern social structure. Or, how early modern grain riots are like and unlike hacker groups.
Pedagogically, my interest in technology obviously promotes a curiosity for the possibilities of online teaching and a desire to explore those possibilities in practice. In face to face teaching over the past 5 years I've taught freshman composition, IAH, and literature courses here and at Illinois State University where I earned my MA in 2009. However, like some others in this class, academia isn't my first career. For me teaching begins with the nearly two decades I spent managing restaurants in upscale/fine dinning. It is in the restaurant world that I honed my teaching style -- it is not as big a stretch as one might expect. As a manager I taught my employees and mentored my assistants in much the same way that I teach my students today.
My first year in graduate school I read a great deal of articles on pedagogy, absorbing immediately practices that I felt would match my style, filing away others that I might make my own, and discarding anything that I knew wouldn't work for me. One of the more empowering things I read that first year was from someone who would later become a mentor of mine, Ron Strickland. The article was titled "Confrontational Pedagogy and Traditional Literary Studies." It was the very idea of confrontation as productive and useful pedagogically that captured me. I have ever since sought to produce in my classroom an atmosphere of "confrontation with it all" including each other and ourselves.
Recent technology reads: Jermey Rifkin's pop. press Third Industrial Revolution and Alexander Galloway's Protocol. I am fascinated by emerging tech in things like quantum processors, organic hard drives, driverless cars, 3d printing, computer chips connected to the brain, and the efforts to stave off old age (a new area of interest that I thank my 40th birthday for).
Welcome Neal! Thanks for the intro. I am really looking forward to hearing more about your approach to teaching literature courses and how technology might fit in and/or productively transform pedagogies in that area. It has been since my M.A. days that I have thought much about that, back when I worked on a course design for a graphic novel class. Never did get to teach that, but it sure would have been fun!
ReplyDeleteBill, those classes you don't get to teach are like a song you start to whistle but don't finish, right? They never quite go away.
ReplyDeleteAs for incorporating technology, I must admit that I am in a bit of a bind there. In face to face I've only recently felt like I am able to achieve a comfortable balance between student participation and my efforts to lead (which, I confess too easily can turn into something lecture-like). I've gotten much better this year, and I know it is something that I will probably never be entirely satisfied with or at least always a struggle to maintain that balance.
Thus, I have not incorporated much technology into my FtF pedagogy. I have high hopes for online teaching as it will necessitates a commitment to technology. Down the road, as in in, not this year but the next, after developing all digital content and employing it, will I begin integrating technology in earnest into my FtF pedagogy.