Alt Dialogue

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Alt Dialogue is a companion series to Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal focused on the intersection of popular culture and pedagogy. Alt Dialogue includes Musings, reviews, poetry, and other related content.

Learning the Game: Individuality and Advancement in the Composition Classroom

Tyler Sheldon
Baton Rouge, LA, USA
tyrsheldon@gmail.com 

Practices in English Composition are undergoing a gradual and seemingly inexorable shift. Comp, seen by some enterprising students as a forum for exploring creative thought and for bettering oneself as a writer and as a student, has in recent years become plagued by students full of doubt rather than hope. To put it more plainly, some students seem to have acclimated to an educational system that provides reward (in the form of grades) regardless of commensurate effort. In some ways this seems a validating practice—likely many of us, as teachers, enjoy lauding our students for their sheer potential to achieve.  However, in my own composition classroom, I hold firmly to two tenets. I do not regularly give extra credit (lest it lose its value as reward for academic effort), and I do not provide answers to any student questions without first witnessing effort on the part of the student to arrive at an answer themselves. Both principles stem from my unwillingness to “spoon-feed” solutions to my students. If they are to better themselves as students and as writers, they must learn how to conduct independent research, and to venture on their own into the dark forest of databases and decks of the university library. They must learn that curricular and extracurricular life alike can be enjoyed without the lure of extra credit, and that “extra credit” as a concept is like dessert at the end of a meal: it is earned once all regular credit is complete. Furthermore, by allowing students to reflect on a question rather than blurting the answer to them right away, I am fostering the independent thought that students deny themselves when they expect their teachers to open their mouths immediately like pedagogical Pez dispensers. Continue Reading →

Are Nuclear Families the Only People That Count?

Craig Wynne
University of the District of Columbia
Washington, D.C., USA
craig.wynne@udc.edu

According to a 2016 United States Census report, 45.2 percent of Americans age 18 and older were unmarried. Projections from the Pew Research Center also indicate that by 2030, 28% of men will have not married before the age of fifty-four. Similar projections also show 23% of women also will have not wed by that same age. These statistics are important because they show that marriage does not hold the same level of importance in people’s minds as it once did, as many people are marrying later, or in some cases, finding happiness in a life outside of marriage. Yet single people are still marginalized in various cultures. Continue Reading →

Review of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching, by David Gooblar

Review of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching, by David Gooblar

Gooblar, David. (2019). The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
272 pages, Hardcover, $29.95

Tyler Sheldon
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA., USA
tyrsheldon@gmail.com

In his new book The Missing Course, David Gooblar writes toward college teachers and administrators alike when he asserts that a more student-centered learning environment is far more effective than a lecture-based classroom. Applied active learning, he asserts, is crucial to student success. Unlike much recent pedagogy scholarship, which contends that a lecture-based classroom is standard for a reason (time-honored “effectiveness,” efficiency, routine), Gooblar favors an engaged and immersive experiential style of teaching. He argues that “[i]n the not-too-distant future, it is now imaginable that researchers will refuse to study lectures as a mode of teaching because to do so would be an unethical imposition on the poor students who have to suffer through them.” He emphasizes this point by noting that some pedagogy scholars are already beginning to agree, and (like him) are treating the experiential model as a foregone conclusion, moving from “the active learning versus lecturing question and focus[ing] instead on determining what kinds of active learning work best” (p. 15). Continue Reading →

Reading Hong Kong in a New Light: Anna Tso’s Hong Kong Stories

Holly H. Y. Chung
The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
hollychung@hsu.edu.hk

 

Book 1: Culinary Charades
Alpha Academic Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-1948210010

Book 2: The Summer of 1997
Alpha Academic Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-1948210027

Book 3: Unforgettable Neighbours
Alpha Academic Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-1948210034

Book 4: Taming Babel
Alpha Academic Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-1948210041

Book 5: Herstory
Alpha Academic Press, 2019. ISBN:978-1948210058 Continue Reading →

When the Crisis Hits Home: Helping Students Cope with Illness and Death

Bridget Goodman
Nazarbayev University
Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan
bridget.goodman@nu.edu.kz

In the previous three columns, I highlighted ways in which social media is providing resources, platforms, and inspiration to continue to educate our students and/or our children during this pandemic.  The presentation of these offerings has been driven by my view, influenced in part by early positive reports out of China, that continuing to teach online can provide structure and a sense of “normalcy” to students and teachers who are forced to remain at home. Continue Reading →

The Coronavirus Crisis Highlights our Vulnerabilities

Bridget Goodman
Nazarbayev University
Astana, Kazakhstan
bridget.goodman@nu.edu.kz

Image 1: A flyer from the New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education thanks participants and shares links to resourcesdeveloped for parents and educators as they transition to online teaching.  https://twitter.com/NJCIE/status/1243652229388697600?s=20

In my previous column, I twice referred to “vulnerable” populations—the medically vulnerable, and small businesses, each of which in their own way may be at risk for succumbing to this pernicious virus. The reality is that these are just two examples of needs that are made more visible by this epidemic. Continue Reading →

Coronavirus, Social Media, and Pedagogical Possibilities

Bridget Goodman
Nazarbayev University
Astana, Kazakhstan
bridget.goodman@nu.edu.kz

There is a saying “may you live in interesting times”, which is intended as a curse. This curse has seemingly come to pass as all around the world many educators like myself sit at home, 6 feet apart from another, trying to plan or adapt lessons for online consumption while outside the classroom where we once taught, a pandemic spreads and a war rages against it. As I scroll through Twitter and Facebook and read links to online news articles through both platforms, I, as an applied linguist, find myself analyzing all the different ways people are talking about this disease. Continue Reading →

Embracing the Darkness: A Review of Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s The Dark Fantastic (2019)

Book Review: Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York University Press, 2019. 225 pgs., $28.00.

Julia Watts
The University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN, USA
jwatts4@vols.utk.edu

When Ebony Elizabeth Thomas was a child, her mother told her, “There is no magic.” As a black girl, Thomas was expected to know and accept reality. For her, there were no fairies or princesses or mermaids; there were no white knights on equally white horses. These fantasies were for white people who had nothing better to do than escape into the imaginary worlds created by and for them. Thomas was taught that magical stories were not for black readers, and she, like the speaker in one of Nikki Giovanni’s (1970) most famous poems,” “…learned/black people aren’t/suppose to dream” (lines 3-4). Continue Reading →

Taking Back the ‘F’ Word: A Book Review of The (other)F Word: A Celebration of the Fat & Fierce, edited by Angie Manfredi

Laura Davis
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Knoxville, TN, USA
ldavi129@vols.utk.edu

Manfredi, Angie (Editor). The (other) F Word: A Celebration of the Fat & Fierce. Amulet Books, 2019. 224 pgs., $18.99.

“Your body is perfect. Yes, yours. Exactly the way it is, right now in this second.”

In The (other) F Word: A Celebration of the Fat & Fierce, editor Angie Manfredi brings together thirty voices, from middle grades and young adult authors to fat influencers and pioneers, to provide young adult readers with differing modes of storytelling – personal essays, poetry, and visual art – to celebrate the “fat” body. Across the anthology, authors and illustrators from diverse backgrounds convey their experiences with fat bodies. The variety of concepts throughout the anthology celebrate the uniqueness of the human body and champion owning all aspects of identity. With Bill Maher proposing “fat-shaming doesn’t need to end, it needs a comeback,” books like Manfredi’s push back against fat-shaming and encourage those who are fat to “realize there’s nothing wrong with being fat” (p. 1). Continue Reading →

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