Teaching

Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture, Faculty of Arts, UPEI

Putting Arts to Work I (Fall 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025)

This course examines the history, purpose, and uses of a Liberal Arts education, with a focus on the three key areas identified in the major: Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture. In this course, students explore the meaning of community engagement, citizenship, and social responsibility. Students are introduced to community-based research and participatory action research. Current trends in the use of technology to promote social change are examined. This course is for students who want to develop skills and knowledge related to civic engagement and community service learning.

Putting Arts to Work II (Winter 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024)

Building on ACLC 1060, students develop a deeper understanding of the Liberal Arts in theoretical, historical, and contemporary concepts. Students also explore the key career areas for Liberal Arts majors, such as journalism, human resources, marketing, NGOs, Arts and Culture, Government, and Education. Drawing upon skills learned in ACLC 1060 and ACLC 1080, this research-based course examines the skills and knowledge necessary to complete a research project. Each research project explores aspects of the Liberal Arts’ intrinsic value, practical applications, social good, and/or personal benefits through a specific theme and primary text(s) of the student’s choosing. While each student designs, researches, and presents an independent research project, students are supported by peer workshopping and feedback.

Putting Arts to Work III (Fall 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025)

Following on the research skills and knowledge gained in ACLC 3060, this course guides students through the design, research, and presentation of a project with application outside the university context. Included in the course are an introduction to project management concepts and methods, with instruction on the process of developing a business plan, and an introduction to some of the fundamental techniques of modern marketing. Liberal Arts skills and knowledge as well as case studies from related fields, such as arts and culture, heritage, journalism, politics, community organizations, will be highlighted. For this applied, experiential project, students will be expected to choose a topic on which they have already done considerable theoretical, critical, and/or research work (e.g., a substantial assignment in a previous course).

Advanced Workshop in Applied Communication (Winter 2023)

In ACLC 4000: Advanced Workshop in Applied Communication, students draw upon previous courses and accumulated knowledge about their chosen fields of future employment to design a subject-specific set of communication products. The purpose of this course is to provide upper-level students with an opportunity to hone the practical application of their communication skills through a workshop process. A requirement of the course will be that students use a variety of forms of communication in the presentation of their ideas and information on their chosen subjects.

Digital Literacy (Fall 2017, 2018)

Digital Literacy is designed to prepare students for 21st century learning and employment. Four skill areas are focused upon in this course: i) Desktop Publishing – Students are introduced to the software that allows them to develop a professional media campaign. Students experiment with designing posters, promotional literature, and brochures. ii) Social Media – Students are introduced to various social media packages. iii) Video Production – Students are introduced to the basics of video productions. Topics include camera and editing techniques; critical review and assessment of video productions. iv) Web Design – Any project or new venture requires a slick web presence. Students are introduced to the basics of web design. This course involves the application of these tools in a project-based setting to create meaningful and relevant products. The technical learning of the different forms of digital literacy is combined with deconstruction and critical analysis of media products. Students experience the course in a hybrid model of face-to-face and online formats.

Digital Humanities (Winter 2018)

Digital Humanities involves the use of computational skills, programs, and applications in the gathering of evidence and data, preserving and representation of texts and other artifacts, and the use of such tools and techniques in the analysis of this evidence. Digital Humanities approaches can encompass highly sophisticated computational analysis of texts and visualization of data, or the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) tools to map and analyze spatial and geographical aspects of a topic. In this course students explore the tools, methods, and analytical potentials associated with digital humanity studies through team-based digital humanities projects. Each year, these course outcomes will be achieved through the study of a specific thematically based subject.

English, UPEI

L.M. Montgomery (Spring 2024)

2024 marks 150 years since the birth of Anne of Green Gables writer, L.M. Montgomery. Montgomery is one of the most famous Canadian novelists, known, beloved, and studied the world over. Montgomery’s influence weaves through PEI, its culture, heritage, and economy. Celebrate Maud150 by learning more about L.M. Montgomery’s life, work, and legacy. We’ll read some of her novels, including Anne of Green Gables, explore her other work like her journals/diaries, photography, and scrapbooking. We’ll consider Montgomery’s lasting impact through adaptations like CBC/Netflix’s Anne with an E, projects like annemanuscript.ca, and PEI tourism and heritage. The course ends just as the L.M. Montgomery Institute’s biennial conference begins. This conference will welcome presenters from 16 different countries. We’ll attend a conference event as a class and students are very welcome to register for other parts of the conference.

Writing by Women (Winter 2021; cross listed with Diversity and Social Justice Studies)

This course, “Writing by Women,” will particularly focus on women writing the city, exploring how women have experienced, imagined, and written about the city in fiction. We will focus on psychological, emotional, sensual, imaginative, and bodily experiences of urban space. Students will bring their own interdisciplinary interests to course discussion and assignments; possible topics will include gender, sex and sexuality, the environment/ecocriticism, place/geography, time, walking, the five senses (sight, smell, touch, sound, taste), romance, marriage, class, work/labour, race, health/well-being, nationality, social justice, and the connection between the ‘real’ and the imagined. In my version of the course, the major assignment was the creation of a podcast on women’s writing (each student group contributed an episode); students also created music, artwork, etc. for the podcast.

English, Dalhousie University

Romantic Literature I (Fall 2016)

English 3026 explores the traditional themes of Romanticism—nature, the imagination, the self, childhood, memory, and the supernatural—while also broaching these topics from newer critical perspectives such as ecocriticim and Romantic urbanisms. This class will also explore the interaction between imaginative writing and pressing political debates over rights—for men, for women, and for the enslaved. Students will also have the opportunity to think about how British Romanticism impacted our corner of the British Empire by linking course readings to nineteenth-century Nova Scotia and its literature. The course’s central themes will converge on our final text, Northanger Abbey, by the most well-known, stylistically innovative, and enduringly popular novelist of the period, Jane Austen. Other authors include William Wordsworth, Thomas Paine, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Burns, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, William Blake, John Thelwall, Mary Robinson, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, John William Polidori, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Prince.

English, Memorial University

Critical Reading and Writing I (Fall 2014, 2 sections)

This course is an introduction to such literary forms as poetry, short fiction, drama, and the essay. Emphasis is placed on critical reading and writing: analysing texts, framing and using questions, constructing essays, organizing paragraphs, quoting and documenting, revising and editing.

Critical Reading and Writing II (Winter 2015)

Critical Reading and Writing II is a study of such forms as the novel, the novella, and
the story sequence. Emphasis is placed on critical reading and writing: analyzing texts,
framing and using questions, constructing essays, organizing paragraphs, conducting research, quoting and documenting, revising and editing. In this course we will study four novels: Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, Lisa Moore’s February, Patrick deWitt’s The Brothers Sisters, and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

English, University of Warwick

Modes of Reading (Fall-Winter, 2012-13, 4 sections)

Modes of Reading (Fall-Winter, 2010-11)

This course offers an introduction to the practices of criticism. Form, genre and literary inheritance will be among the topics addressed. The module aims to enable students to work with a variety of critical approaches, and to develop an informed awareness of the possibilities available to them as readers and critics. Thematically organized lectures provide a frame of cultural reference on which the students will draw in their close readings in seminars.